


cosmonaut.

by ghostshaming



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Dimension Travel, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Parallel Universes, Post-Season/Series 03, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2020-10-30 05:37:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20809436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostshaming/pseuds/ghostshaming
Summary: Sometime in the formless dark before breakfast, Mike Wheeler vanishes.





	1. Chapter 1

It’s worse, this time.

The summer is a fire that burns and burns out, into the sparking husk of an Indiana fall. Will Byers waving from the back of his brother’s Ford is the last ember to fade. After that, it’s dark. Mike fumbles the basement light and slouches to the cold floor where the blanket fort used to be, and he waits. He waits. Nothing happens.

This is the farthest he’s ever been from them, and the twin threads tug on his heart. He can see them going taut, thrumming, fraying, and he worries they’ll snap like guitar strings, somewhere deep and dark where he won’t even hear the _twang_. He wants to know what Will’s listening to on the radio, what city El’s devouring through the window for the first time. It’s like they’re parts of his mind that he can’t reach into anymore, black dots in the edge of his vision.

October is a backslide. It’s untucked shirts, red gashes on tests, and shouts down basement stairs. It’s an Atari back at the top of Karen Wheeler’s closet, gathering dust, and an “_I just don’t know what to do_” whispered to Madge Galloway on the phone. It’s detention, detention, detention. A sense of imminence at the quiet dinner table.

There’s a storm on Halloween, and Mike’s call won’t go through. He stands by the basement phone, days-old sweatshirt too small at his wrists, and feels the thread in his chest pull.

“They’re probably out trick-or-treating,” his mom says long past dark, cold cream around her eyes, and he’s wound too tightly to explain that _that’s not enough_, not without shouting or stomping. He’s too big for tantrums, but his _head_ feels like a tantrum, because Lucas and Max are at someone’s Halloween party, and Dustin had play rehearsal, and he’s sitting here pinned down by something he can’t name, something that won’t let him breathe.

November is a blur. Will calls on the first day, explains that their phone shorted. El sends a postcard with a muted painting of an old-timey street._ There aren’t this many horses now_, she explains in large, slanted handwriting. It’s addressed from Greenwood. Mike misses her – misses _both_ of them – like a limb, and he _wants_ it to hurt, but instead he just feels tired. He feels _exhausted_. He lays in bed for two-and-a-half days, his hair a tangled shock against the pillow. Beneath his bones, it feels like even his heart is beating slower, like his lungs can’t remember to breathe. Like maybe they’ll just stop, if he gives them time.

“You’re going for Thanksgiving, right?” Max asks him in history class. There’s a bite to it that he might be imagining, something gently jealous and chiding. _You get to see them soon_, she reminds him. _You shouldn’t be acting like this. You shouldn’t be this messed up again_. 

“Yeah.” Mike puts his head down on the desk, wood grain blurring to black, tuning out his friends’ exasperated sighs.

He doesn’t go for Thanksgiving. Nana Schmidt falls again, and the Wheelers all shuttle to her nursing home in Kokomo. They eat blobby gravy on plastic trays and watch the news for hours.

“I was supposed to go _too_,” Nancy reminds him over a can of ginger ale. The lights make everything look blue. “You’re not the only one who’s disappointed.”

“I _know_.” It’s one more syllable than Mike’s managed the whole trip, except to gripe about who’s getting the motel shower first. He crawls into bed before it’s even dark out, sneakers still tied, leaving mud in the sheets.

The next morning, he tries to call the Byers’. The line is busy.

December is black. December is _frenzy_. It roars in on the tail of the first snow and rattles his dark mood until it feels like a shaken soda, too many sparks on too many synapses. It’s stinging eyes, clenched fists, spinning thoughts that he can barely understand. It’s yelling at his dad over undone chores and walking up to the radio tower in blinding sleet, shivering to the bone. It’s _“Your principal called”_ and “_We’re getting concerned”_ and _“We thought you outgrew your moods._” 

It’s bullshit. December is bullshit, and Mike thinks he never stood a chance once it got its teeth in. He ignores his parents and his friends and spends whole nights - one after the other - awake in the basement, just like last year, hunched next to a useless radio that refuses to fizzle into life, no matter how many times he takes it apart and puts it back together again. Will and El have told him they’re okay, they’re liking school, their house is alright, but the maelstrom in his head won’t stop turning. How does he know if he can’t see them? How can he look after them from two hours away? How can he just sit here and not _do_ anything? All of his life has been about keeping Will safe, and then about keeping them _both_ safe, and now his hands are suddenly grasping at empty air. In his head they’re both screaming, bleeding; black smoke pours into their lungs, and they try and try to call his name. The pictures fill his dreams, and when sleep stops coming altogether, they follow him out of bed, out of the house, into the frost-grey morning, leaving devilish tracks in the snow.

On December 10th, Karen Wheeler looks over her wine glass and says, “On _Christmas_? Honey, we’re going up to see Nana. I _told_ you.”

And on December 11th, sometime in the formless dark before breakfast, Mike Wheeler vanishes.

* * *

The first missing persons case in Hawkins since 1983 doesn’t make the news. No search parties comb the frozen underbrush of Mirkwood. There are no casseroles baked, no posters slapped on shop windows, no candles held behind furtive hands on the football field. A single sheet of paper in the police department declares Michael Theodore Wheeler missing. Cause of absence, runaway. Mental state, upset.

“This isn’t like Will.” The cooling mug in Karen’s hand leaves a ring on the newspaper; she puts it back down without taking a sip, a feedback loop of fidgets running its course next to the kitchen wallpaper. Against her ear, tinny hold music plays from the phone. “You can’t compare it to Will.”

“Why _not_?” Nancy grips the doorway like a talisman, trying to find calm somewhere in the width of the molding against her palm, in the way it fits between her thumb and her pinky. If she focuses on something else – _anything_ else – she can nearly forget the way her heart is racing out of time. “Because he _took_ things?”

“He took things,” Karen echoes. Another touch to her coffee cup, another twist of the phone cord around her finger. “He left with a plan.”

“I’ve already called down there twice.” She’d caught them in the midst of breakfast the first time, Jonathan harried and pressed, his mouth half-full of toast. By the second call, an air far grimmer had fallen over the line, like a black cloud stretching from Hawkins to Greenwood. “Look,” Nancy adds, “if you’d just let me go out and-”

“We’re doing everything we can,” Karen cuts in, and in the lines of her eyes Nancy doesn’t doubt that she believes herself. Her parents are following what they know, what the world has told them to do. They’re not Joyce Byers. “Once your father- Oh, hi, Helen? It’s Karen Wheeler again, sorry to-”

Nancy can’t listen to another call with the state patrol, another vapid exchange of niceties. She leaves the kitchen in a blind huff, swallowing down the wild urge to kick and scream and swear, to upset all of the stupid pillows on her mother’s stupid sofa. Some part of her needs to make a mark, a dent _somewhere_, in the middle of every useless adult trying to track down her brother.

When the doorbell rings, she’s halfway up the stairs, smearing a thumb across her mascara.

For a moment there’s only sick dread. It twists cold in her stomach, deafens her with blank shock. It’s going to be the police; she knows it like she knows her own name. The new chief with the stiff, white mustache, holding his hat against his uniform coat. Anonymous and scripted. They’ll have found Mike’s bike, or his backpack, twisted off a highway or dumped in a snowbank, with or without its owner. She’s trying to decide which of the two she’d prefer when Lucas Sinclair’s voice erupts, muffled, from behind the door.

“We can _see _you!”

“We have Mike’s homework!” Dustin, too, his cold-reddened face pressed against the window.

Nancy has the door unbolted and open before Karen can make it out of the kitchen doorway; she’d been hovering there with a white, grasping face and a hand over the receiver. When she sees the visitors’ faces, she re-masks, deflates with relief. Returns to her post.

“Homework,” Lucas repeats. He gives his overpacked, snow-dusted bookbag a rustle as he sidles through the open door.

“He’s-” Nancy’s jaw works, but she can’t make the right sounds come out. _Has no one told them?_

“Puking?” Dustin shakes his hair out, flinging ice into Nancy’s face. Behind them, Mrs. Sinclair’s car is idling in the driveway, exhaust puffing out in little clouds.

“He’s not here.” It’s too quiet, a little uncertain. Not the conviction Nancy usually aims to speak with.

Lucas frowns, one eyebrow quirked like he’s starting into a complicated math problem “Where _is_ he?”

“I’m sorry, I- I thought they were gonna come talk to you.” Nancy pushes her hair out of her eyes, looking between them in something that’s both apology and panic. _They came and talked to you before_. “He’s… We don’t know where he is.”

“Holy _shit_.”

“What the _hell_?” Lucas drops the backpack, eyes doubling in size. “Why didn’t anyone-”

“I thought someone _would_!” It’s too defensive, too guilty. Nancy sits down on the stairs, hysteria rising behind shaking knees. “The police have your names.” _It’s just like last time_, she doesn’t add, though they can all feel it between them. Back in the kitchen, Karen still chatters at the state patrol. _Bicycle. Radio. Mood swings._ Like a parrot on loop.

“When did it happen?” Lucas finally asks, voice a touch steadier. There’s an efficiency to him, a sense that he’s forming a plan. He and Mike have always had that in common, like twin commanders, too smart and too stubborn for their own good.

Nancy shrugs, and hates how it feels. She shouldn’t be the one shrugging. “Overnight. He took things.”

“Shit. _Shit_.” Dustin looks like he’s going to be sick on the welcome mat.

“If either of you know _any_thing-”

Lucas shakes his head, eyes so honest they hurt. “Have you called the Byers?”

“Twice.” From the quick glance they share, she knows they’re going to as well; Will and El will be home from school, and then the news will be out. “Our dad and Jonathan are both out looking.”

“Just two people?” Dustin’s face wrinkles, incredulous to the point of anger. “In _winter_?”

“Will had_ hundreds_!”

“Will was _different_.” The words are every bit her mother’s, tasting like white wine and hairspray in her mouth, and Nancy wants to take them back immediately. Because if she pushes past the lightning panic in her stomach, she can reluctantly understand. Mike isn’t a timid boy who got lost in the woods, not to the police. He’s nearly fifteen, a beansprout of a troublemaker with a poor behavioral record. No one’s going to line up to scour the woods this time.

“Will didn’t leave on purpose.” It’s Lucas who finally fills the silence, with that steely understanding Nancy is starting to get used to. “But even if Mike did-”

“He’s still in danger,” Dustin finishes, the way these boys always do, as if their minds are switches in a circuit. All means to the same end. She knows they’re going to leave here, strap on their bandanas and headsets and snow boots, try to _do_ something. It’s the old routine, now. Shotguns and baseball bats and kids with B-movie monsters breathing down their necks. And if Mike had been snagged by a Demogorgon, or sucked into the Upside Down, they might have a plan. They might have a place to _start_.

What she’s not sure how to tell them is this: there are monsters that don’t have sharp teeth, that can’t be torn apart by fireworks or magic. They live in your mind, whisper horrible things to you day and night, but heat won’t burn them out.

And the worst part is, they can steal you away all the same. 

* * *

It’s just after midnight when the LTD rattles into the carport. The headlights throw striped shadows into the front bedroom, across Will’s blankets, and after a minute he hears the clatter of the screen door.

“Nothing.” Jonathan’s voice is quiet, solemn. Will slides off his mattress and stands, soft and soundless; across the room, a pair of sloppy braids don’t stir on their pillowcase.

Frustration and pain are audible in his mom’s sigh. “Shit_. Shit_.”

“Went up on 29, back down through Kokomo. Not sure what I thought we’d find.”

“They still aren’t doing searches?” his mom asks. “Flyers?”

A sliver of orange cuts in from the hall as Will opens the door, his breath held behind anxiously chewed lips. It’s been almost nine hours, and his heart still hasn’t fallen back into rhythm. For a moment, he feels like his mother and brother might hear it.

“I’m surprised they told the police at all.” A chair scrapes on the linoleum. Exhaustion is written in Jonathan’s every word. “Ted Wheeler kept saying he’d come crawling home by dark, tail between his legs.” He says Mr. Wheeler’s name like it’s a curse.

Another sigh, pressed and beleaguered. “This is _exactly_ what I’ve been saying.”

“I know.”

“We need to tell them. They have a right to-”

Then, without a heartbeat’s warning, Jonathan’s head tips right; it’s as though he’d sensed the pair of eyes peering from the hall, terrified and grieving, waiting for an answer no one in this house can give.

“Hey, bud.” He looks apologetic, like his little brother would be better off not having heard of the search’s fruitlessness. _Bullshit_. “Can’t sleep?”

Will steps into the hall and closes the door behind him, hoping he hasn’t woken El. There’s something so haunting, so final about the death march to the kitchen, and he takes it step by uneasy step.

“You didn’t find him.” It’s not a question, but his mom still shakes her head.

“We’re not done looking,” Jonathan is quick to assure him. But even though there’s hard conviction in his voice, a determination to the clench of his first, none of it reaches his eyes. His eyes are soft, scared, too young. His eyes are no stronger than Will’s, on the hardest nights.

“You need to get some rest, baby.” Their mom steps over in her ratty slippers, laying a hand on Will’s shoulder. It feels like empty consolation, and he has to resist shoving it off. Every muscle in his body wants to rush back down the hall, shake El awake, beg her to _do something_.

Only, he won’t. He can’t. _She_ can’t. 

“I want to stay up,” he pushes, hating how his voice sounds. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“There’s nothing to miss right now.” It’s rational, soothing, like Jonathan’s trying to talk him down from something. The logic hurts more than anything, the _He’s right, he’s right, they’ve stopped_. “‘Not ‘til morning.”

“But he’s _out_ there.” Something in Will’s throat feels tight, like tears, or hysteria. He wants to run. He wants to tear out the front door, into the street, straight to Hawkins.

“Will, sweetie-”

“He could be freezing to death! Why don’t they _care_?” The Wheelers, the police, the _world_. Everything feels like a black hole, growing and growing, and he and El are the only ones who can sense it, the only ones sounding the alarm. Even Dustin and Lucas hadn’t seemed to see it earlier, over the phone. They’d kept saying Mike was upset, Mike was angry, Mike had been depressed. He’d run away, and probably crashed his bike somewhere, and that’s what he needed rescuing from. No monsters, no Upside Down. Just a plain, human crisis.

Will doesn’t understand. When he talked to Mike the night before last, he seemed fine. Energetic, talkative, _happy_ even. He wouldn’t have just disappeared on his own.

“They care,” his mom finally says, leaning down to look at him with her wide, soft eyes. His heart hurts. “Everyone cares _so much_. We all love Mike.” 

_Not like me_, a terrible, strange voice insists, somewhere deep in Will’s head. He closes his eyes, swallows it back down, hopes his mom and Jonathan can’t somehow hear it. _What do you know about loving him?_

By the time Will slinks back into his sheets, the anger building in his chest has eroded back into grief. It claws at his ribs, squeezes his lungs, threatens to dissolve him into nothing if he lets it get control. He tucks his knees against his chest and shakes.

“Nothing?”

El’s voice is so quiet, it may as well have been a breath, or a thought. Rolling over, Will looks up at the bed, at a pair of too-serious eyes peering over the edge, barely visible in the darkness. She’s holding his old bear to the front of her (_Mike’s_) sweatshirt.

“Nothing,” he confirms, voice tight. He doesn’t want to cry in front of her right now; if he cries, she’ll cry, and neither of them will be able to stop. They’re a feedback loop of grief, ever since July.

“I’ll try again.” El sits up straighter, already pushing the covers aside, but Will shakes his head in protest. As badly as he wants answers, he’s wrung dry of watching her break further with every failed attempt. It’s going to break him too, before long.

“You’ve been trying all _day_.”

“And I’ll try until I _find_ him!”

Some months ago, the rise of her voice may have rattled the door, cracked the flimsy window pane, knocked a shelf off the wall. But now, in the black silence of the cramped room, it’s just a child’s voice, tired and desperate and too young for its grief.

In the quiet that follows, Will sits up from his mattress on the floor, craning his neck until he can see her bowed head against sleeve-covered hands, the soundless way her shoulders shake.

“Hey.” The bed creaks when he perches on the edge of it. “Scoot over?”

It’s a question, a gentle suggestion subject to rebuke. Among all the things Will understands about El, her need for boundaries is paramount. The way their skin crawls when the world is too much, too close; the memory of their bodies not being their own. The need for comfort without suffocation. Silent nights pressed against opposite ends of the sofa.

This time, El nods. She wipes a sleeve over her red nose and backs closer to the wall. The two stretch out like twin saplings, only their socked toes touching beneath the old quilt. A car passes outside, and in the striped stretch of headlights, Will sees the fresh sheen in El’s eyes.

“Have you felt anything?” she half-whispers, and it needs no further explanation. Will shakes his head, and for the first time he’s not sure it’s the answer he wants to give. Because if there’s no Mind Flayer, if there’s no Upside Down…

Neither of them knows where to start with simple, human horror.

* * *

<strike>r e w i n d</strike>

The bike is gone.

That’s the third thing he notices, once he gets onto his feet. The first is the sick throbbing of his nose, smashed against the hard ground; he can taste blood on his tongue, tacky but still flowing. The second is the sharp crunch of gravel under tires, only yards behind him and moving closer. Mike keeps scanning the ground, like the bike will just appear in the high grass if he stares at the ditch long enough. It isn’t until a car door clicks up on the highway shoulder that he realizes what’s going on.

“You need help?”

The woman who climbs out of the rusty truck looks about Nana Schmidt’s age, but somehow hardier, with a patch-work coat and a broad jaw. Mud-spattered boots kick through the frozen dew as she makes her way over.

“No, I’m-” Mike stammers, but it’s hard to mask his utter confusion. It sounds almost like a question. He watches the woman come closer, a few seconds of silent stand-off. The blood dripping over his upper lip is probably all the answer necessary. “What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty, just about.” The woman furrows her grey brow. “You look half-frozen. Someone should probably take a look at that nose.”

_No, no, no, shut up_. Something hostile and blind twists in Mike’s head, and he closes his eyes. “Bike. I can’t find my bike.”

“Did you crash it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” The last he remembers is a truck, a sideways skid, then… something. He’s not sure. White-hot pain in his face, tumbling against the icy sludge at the bottom of the ditch. He looks around again, waiting for his eyes to catch a flash of silver. Nothing. Nothing.

The woman sighs, and there’s something apologetic about it. “I don’t see any bike, son. Your folks can come back and look for it.” _No, no, fuck them, don’t talk about them, don’t-_ “But what _you_ need is some dry clothes and a doctor.”

Mike doesn’t even feel cold, but underneath his racing thoughts and his anxiety he’s vaguely aware that his fingers feel numb. He hadn’t thought to bring gloves. Admitting a touch of defeat, he finally follows the woman out of the ditch and starts to reform his plan. He doesn’t need the bike. Screw the bike. He can just drive there, it can’t be too-

“Where do you live?”

“Indianapolis.” It comes out clumsy, a little too fast, and Mike can see the immediate understanding in the women’s eyes. “South of Indianapolis, I mean. Greenwood.”

“Where do you _really_ live?” she asks patiently, opening the passenger door for him. The truck is still running, musty heat pumping out into the frigid air. The radio is crackling out something with banjos, and the back of the cab is full of plastic sacks; a corner of red gift wrap pokes out of one.

“… Hawkins,” Mike finally admits, flexing his numb fingers. Horror visions of frostbite and amputation are starting to twist in around the disoriented determination. His head feels dizzy, his thoughts feel too fast. He needs to get back to the starting point and try again.

“That’s better. C’mon.”

As the truck grumbles its way back onto the road, Mike makes one last scan of the ditch – a nervous tic of his eyes – still hoping in vain for his bike to appear in the tall, brown ryegrass. No luck.

The way back seems shorter. It always does, on car rides or long walks, landmarks passing as reminders instead of discoveries. Mike lolls his head against the window, an offered Kleenex pressed to his nose, and listens to his driver prattle, phasing in and out of understanding. His head still feels like a windstorm, but it’s… quieter, maybe. He almost feels like he could go to sleep, given the chance. When _did_ he last sleep? Two days ago? Three?

“I’m headed to my son’s for the holidays,” the woman says just as they pass over Rock Creek. Mike doesn’t remember it being frozen before. “He and his wife just had a baby, their second. A little girl.”

“Hm.”

“They’ve been trying to move down from Kewanna for awhile, get closer to a good school system. Then – lo and behold – a job opens up, and then a house, one after the other.” She claps a hand on the steering wheel, like an exclamation point. “Someone was getting out of town real fast, after that business with the mall.” 

“Yeah.” The edge of town is approaching fast, too fast, and anxiety starts to build in Mike’s stomach. He thought he’d gotten farther away than this. He thought he’d almost _escaped_.

“Joe Keller, wife’s named Daisy.” Said as though Mike might know him. “Big house on Maple.”

That _does_ get his attention. “Maple?”

“Maple Street,” the woman confirms, dipping her chin in a succinct nod. The radio goes static, and she reaches to fiddle with it. “Single mom with a couple of girls. Moved out in August, I think.”

Mike can’t claim to have a vigilant eye on his neighbors’ comings and goings, but even in all the summer’s chaos he thinks he would have noticed someone moving out. Besides, Mrs. Henderson is the only single mom he can think of on Maple, and she’s certainly still there.

“Who are your folks, honey?” The car pulls under the highway overpass, past the sawmill and the back way to the Byers’ house. The sun is starting to come out from behind the morning flurry, melting what stuck to the asphalt.

“The Wheelers.” Mike chews on his lip. “On Maple.” 

Something funny passes over the woman’s face then, something Mike can’t parse. It’s between sympathy and scrutiny, and it makes his stomach clench. He chews harder. Home is just a mile away, and then he can regroup, he can-

The truck doesn’t turn where it’s supposed to. Instead of going east it shuffles straight into downtown, right past the library and Melvald’s and the unlit Christmas tree, right up to-

“No. _No._” Mike swallows down panic and betrayal, hands fumbling with the door handle. “Not the police, I don’t need-”

“Sweetheart…” The woman’s eyes are so soft, so unbearably concerned, it’s disarming. It cuts right through Mike’s furious scramble. She eases the truck into a spot, then leans right against the center console, slow and careful. Outside, the last flecks of the storm settle on the windshield. “Now, I don’t know if I’m right,” she continues, voice gentle. “If I am, though, then you know what I’m about to say.”

“I was gonna call them,” Mike spits out, a slurred mess, head already shaking the lies free. “I _swear_.”

“I never met your mama, but I don’t have to know she and your daddy have been beside themselves.” The radio has fizzled back in, coughing out something tired and festive, and Mike wants to scream.

“I’ll go home,” he insists. “I’ll _tell_ her, I promise, just don’t-” The front door of the station opens up, sending another jolt of panic through his stomach, and he looks up at the woman with desperation in his eyes.

“You’re not in any trouble, Michael. Not with Hawkins’ finest, at least.” It should be reassuring; it’s not, not at all. “But there’s a lot of people here who’ve been hurting for a long time, and you can clear it all up if you just march in there right now.”

Everything grinds to a halt in Mike’s head. The windstorm calms in the face of complete bewilderment, and he just blinks. Once, twice. Again. “What-”

“Flo’s not in today, Gladys.”

Even muffled by the window, the voice is the last straw. It tips Mike right off his axis, sends him hurtling. All the breath seems to leave his lungs; he’s frozen in place, trying and utterly failing to turn his head towards that familiar grumble. He catches the crank of the window, Gladys’ raspy response – _“I’m not here for gossip, Jim!”_ – but it all feels like slow motion, like his head hasn’t fully caught up with the world.

“Who’s the kid?”

“Honey? Can you talk to the chief?”

_You’re crazy, you’re crazy, you’ve gone crazy_.

He looks. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all of the kind words! This chapter should answer at least a couple of your questions ♥︎
> 
> xx ghost

“Full name?”

“Michael Theodore Wheeler.”

“Date of birth?”

The light is too bright. Hopper had said – twice – that this wasn’t an interrogation, that he just needed to get the _facts_, but the light is too bright, and Mike’s heart feels like it’s going to explode in his chest, and he really thinks his nose might be broken, despite what they’ve said, and-

“Date of birth, Mike.”

“December 23, 1970.” He chokes on it; he doesn't want to be here. 

Hopper dwarfs the swivel chair he’s perched in, a hulk of tension – _alive, alive_ – across the small table. He fiddles a pen between his fingers, furrows his brow at the folder and at Mike and back again. Whatever he’s trying so desperately to make sense of, he’s not spilling.

“Parents’ names?” Hopper asks, and it breaks something in Mike’s chest, just a little farther.

“Hopper, it’s _me_.” He clenches his fingers around the table’s edge, body tight with paranoia. His knee hasn’t stopped shaking for the last hour. “It’s _Mike_. Just tell me what’s going on!”

“I’m asking the questions.” A police cliché. Another look at the cream-colored folder, back at Mike’s face. For the first time, Mike catches a glimpse inside, and what he sees just twists his stomach up further.

His own seventh-grade school photo, blown-up and paper-clipped, smiling at him from between a mess of typewritten papers. Plaid shirt, slicked-down hair; a kid he doesn't know anymore. 

“What the _hell_?” Mike’s scrambling to his feet in a heartbeat, trying to get a better look at the folder, but Hopper’s a step ahead, whipping it shut with a palpable puff of air.

“_Hey_.” The first recognizable flash of annoyance in his eyes, after an hour of impenetrable concrete. “I don’t know where you’ve been all this time that they let you mouth off like that, but Hawkins ain’t it.”

Mike scowls. “I haven’t been _any_-”

“Two years.”

The room falls still. For a moment, all Mike can hear is the muffled _click_ of typewriters, the huff of cars outside. He’s afraid to ask - _terrified_ \- so he doesn’t. He just keeps his lips pressed tight, his fingers tense against the cold metal, waiting for whatever explanation the universe can give him. The last two hours have completely drained him; he doesn’t even want to go to Greenwood, now. He just wants to go _home_. 

“Two _years_, Mike.” Hopper repeats, his voice quieter. “You’re not in trouble. But we need to know what happened. Your _parents_ need to know.”

Mike just shakes his head, jaw opening and closing helplessly. Then, when he finally finds the words somewhere in the fog-thick air: “What year is it?" It’s all he can think of. He fell off his bike and through… _some_thing. Some kind of portal. Out of his own time and into the future, missing all the months or years in between. Then Hopper answers, and the only theory he’s been able to form goes right in the wastebasket.

“Eighty-five. December.” There’s a careful sympathy to it, despite his characteristic roughness, like he's speaking to a small child. “You’re almost fifteen.”

“I _know_, I-” Mike sinks down a bit, hand rubbing at his temples. It’s like he can feel his own body unraveling, feet-first; he wishes it would go faster. “I saw my parents last _night_.”

“Mike,” Hopper says, and it’s _weary_. It’s every time Mike’s yelled at his parents and just gotten _concern_ in response, every look between his friends after one of his outbursts. Every unspoken, _He’s lost it_. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

“What the hell is that supposed to _mean_?” He swallows down tears, hard. His throat hurts. His head hurts. Everything feels _wrong_, and he wants to disappear. He wants to so badly he could _scream, _until his throat sandpapers into nothing. 

Another world-weary sigh. “Right now, it means you’re gonna sit here while I make a couple calls.” Hopper pushes the chair back. It squeaks tremendously against the tiled floors; his knees pop when he stands. “Don’t jump out the goddamn window, kid.”

* * *

The Hallmark Gold Crown on Wabash Street has exactly one customer inside – a portly grandfather picking through Christmas ornaments – when the phone rings. 

Once, twice – “Hello?” Joyce Byers leans on the sales counter, hauling the tangled phone cord over a scattering of gift boxes.

“I need you down at the station.” Hopper, two hours early for his lunch break call. On the days he can’t drive over with a couple of sandwiches or a thermos of soup from Flo, they're like clockwork.

“Hop,” Joyce replies, lowering her voice a bit, “you know I can’t just-”

“It’s an emergency,” he cuts in, and at once the whole world seems to tilt on its axis.

Two years since that November. Two years since Jonathan’s innocent eyes at the breakfast table, since Karen Wheeler’s voice over the phone, always so helpful and polite. Both of them breaking news that would crack the entire world in two, that would ring in Joyce’s ears like tinnitus. And then, just a few days later-

“What is it?” It’s useless to keep the panic out, ingrained as it is in every part of her being, like some sleeping beast. “Is it one of-” One of _ours_, she’s about to say, when Hopper’s answer stops the words cold on her tongue.

“It’s Mike.”

Joyce feels her chest deflate. It’s like the other shoe dropping, a kitchen timer going off. Ticking down this whole time, moving towards this certain eventuality, yet it still makes her pause. Inhale, exhale. _Oh_.

“They found him,” she manages after a moment. By now the old man up front is listening, but she doesn’t care. She leans on her elbows, eyes closed tightly, and tries not to think about what this means. 

It's over. 

“They found him,” Hopper confirms, but there’s something strange in his voice. Something tentative. “Out on Highway 29.”

“… _What_?”

“Gladys Keller spotted him climbing out of a ditch. Said he’d crashed his bike, but she didn’t see one.” There’s a pause, a moment of disbelieving _awe_, like he barely accepts his own words. “He’s alive, Joyce.”

She fumbles the receiver, fingers weak against the plastic. “H-how? _How_, Hop?” They all know what happened. They all know what the odds were from the start, and it’s been two _years_, and-

“I don’t have any answers.” He’s just as rattled, but he carries it deeper, buried under the gruff impatience. She can picture him wiping his face with one hand, shaking his head. “He’s pretty messed up.”

“Have you called Karen?” _God_, Karen and the girls. It’s unimaginable.

“As soon as we get off the phone.” There’s a reluctance to it. He doesn’t know how to say this any better than Joyce does. “But she’s hours away. You’re the closest thing he has right now.”

And she knows it’s true, before he even says it. Maybe she’s known since the start, since he called to break the news to her first. Karen and Ted are the parents who lost him, but Joyce is the one who’s left. Joyce is the sentry.

“Okay,” she says, already grabbing her keys. “Okay, I’ll… I’ll be there in twenty.”

* * *

She’s there in nine-and-a-half, bursting through the front door with the December wind behind her, nearly tipping an umbrella stand on its side.

“Mornin’ Joyce,” a voice starts – Barry Brighton, a new cadet barely older than Jonathan – but she cuts in with unintended impudence.

“Where’s Mike?”

It feels a lot like showing up at the principal’s office, there to fetch one of her brood up by the scruff from some fight or illness or other mid-day incident. Heart pounding in her ears, uncertainty and concern filling up her lungs. Barry points one skinny finger towards a nondescript door, and in seconds she’s turning the knob, pushing into a moment she never thought she’d see.

The boy sitting at the interrogation table is taller than expected, almost impossibly lanky. His hair is thick and tangled, and his cheekbones are too sharp, but the second he looks up with those dark, deep-set eyes, she knows just who she’s looking at.

“_Mike_.” It’s barely more than a breath, than the sound of her chest falling in relief. It’s every Friday night, every striped shirt, every toothy grin over the dinner table. It’s every time he wrapped his skinny arms around Will, every time Joyce watched them hold hands and felt so thankful for the boy who’d burst his way into her son’s life, made everything _better_.

He blinks and sets down his paper cup of water. “Mrs. Byers?” His hands are trembling.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Joyce winds her way around the table in a heartbeat, stopping just short of wrapping him up in her arms, not wanting to overwhelm him. “I’m here, it’s okay. _You’re_ okay.”

Mike’s face softens, some of the defensiveness draining out, and at once Joyce can see all of the fear, all of the confusion. A wavering confession: “I don’t know what’s going on.”

It cuts right through Joyce’s chest, a physical ache. She reaches out, gently touching his arm, letting him lead. “That’s alright, honey. We’ll get it all sorted.”

The tiniest wobble goes through Mike’s lower lip; he scrunches up his nose, sniffing stubbornly. “I was trying to get to your house.”

It’s nothing that makes sense, nothing she was expecting to hear, but Joyce tries not to let the surprise show in her face. _He’s pretty messed up_, Hopper had said, and it all becomes true at once. Mike isn’t just a miracle – he’s a victim, and they don’t even know what of. “Yeah?” she offers, unsure what else to say, unsure how to make any of this better.

“I was trying to come see them,” he adds, a certain desperation behind it, like he _needs_ her to understand. “I just wanted to _see_ them.”

_Them_. Will and El, maybe? Only, how did he know El was living with them? She worries at her lip for a moment, then tries, “They missed you so much, sweetie. They’ve thought about you all this time.” Two years, and Joyce hasn’t stopped waking to the sound of soft sobs in the night. A bar of light under the bathroom, back before the move across town, when Will had been sharing a room with Jonathan. She’d sit on the edge of the tub with him, hold his head against her shoulder as the sun came up.

Mike nods, but there’s something absent about it. His eyes are too wide, too unfocused, like he’s been flooded with so much information that he’s stopped truly taking it in. Joyce doesn’t blame him. He’s walked back into a life that’s moved on without him.

“Are they here?” There’s a hangnail on his thumb that he’s been fiddling with, and it’s starting to bleed, tracking red on his fingers. “In Hawkins?”

Joyce thinks better than to ask why they wouldn’t be. “Yeah. Yeah, they’re in school. Do you want to see them later?” 

Another nod. “Mm-hmm.”

She rubs at Mike's arm – too cold, too tense – but the squeak of the door interrupts anything else she may have said. Mike’s posture straightens back up, his guard bristling, as Hopper peers in.

“Joyce.” Strained, already exhausted just three hours after they sat across the breakfast table from one another this morning. “A word?”

The hall smells like burnt coffee and cigarettes, like every morning or afternoon or midnight Joyce has sat in one of these plastic chairs, waiting for news she didn’t want to hear. She pulls her jacket tighter and looks back at the closed door, as if she could make sense of all of this by giving it another glance.

“You talked to Karen?” she asks, just above a whisper. She’s not sure how far the news has made it yet, and she doesn’t want to be the one to tip off a nosy cadet. The second boy to come back from the dead in Hawkins is sure to make a riot.

Hopper ushers her down familiar, worn carpet, towards the open door of his office. “She and Nancy’ll be here about one. They’re dropping Holly off with family.”

It’s three-hour drive north from Louisville, where Karen had quietly whisked the girls in the last weeks of summer, just as the mall’s ashes were cooling. Lucas had sounded the alarm the day the sign went up, and the SOLD sticker got slapped on just two weeks later. It was a goodbye all of them felt profoundly. No one was sure where Ted had gotten to after the divorce, and with the house sitting empty, waiting for its new family, Hawkins was unsettlingly devoid of Wheelers. It was why Joyce had decided so concretely to stay; the split-second that escaping Hawkins crossed her mind, she’d banished the thought. Because wherever Mike was, whatever had happened to him, he needed someone here. He needed a parent who would wait for him, who would drive past the spot where it happened and hope he could somehow feel her standing there, keeping him company.

Hopper sinks into his chair, pulls out a cigarette. It dangles in his fingers for a moment, unlit. Finally, he takes a deep, rasping breath. “I can’t make sense of it.”

“It’s _him_, Hop.” Joyce doesn’t intend the impatience that works its way into her voice, but it’s there nonetheless, pushing across the desk, trying to tug at Hopper’s jacket. It's 1983 again, and she's begging him to understand - her boy. Her _boy_. 

“Didn’t say it wasn’t,” Hopper answers, quieter than usual. His jaw is clenched, like he’s got a headache coming on.

“Then what are you thinking?” It’s not a question she really wants the answer to, not with Mike’s wide, terrified eyes still burned behind her own. Everything in her aches to leave, to go back down the hall to him, to protect him from this. 

“Even if he survived, got confused, wandered off…” Hopper lowers the unused cigarette. “Joyce, there were people combing every inch of this county for _weeks_, looking for El. They would have found him.”

“Maybe they did.” It’s a horrible implication, and it makes her feel sick deep in her stomach, but it’s better than Hopper’s. “Maybe they’ve had him all this time.”

“And he, what – escaped? Like El?”

Joyce shakes her head, takes the cigarette from him. One hand fishes in her jacket for her lighter. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened, or where he’s been, but I do know that boy, Hop.” Wide eyes, messy hair, too much fear behind a brave mask. She knew him for seven years, and she knows him still. “He’s scared, and he needs our _help_ right now, not our suspicions.”

“I know.” Hopper passes her his own. “I don’t want to be going at this like some conspiracy theorist, okay? That’s not what I’m trying to do. But you know the facts just as well as me, and I want you to be prepared.”

The frown is automatic, lit up by the flicker of flame in her hand. “Prepared for what?” she asks around the cigarette. It's what they say to parents in hospital waiting rooms, what they say to people who are teetering on the edge of absolute loss. “For him to be another _fake_? Something put out by the lab?”

“Maybe they don’t want us digging around in the quarry anymore.” It’s a weak suggestion, Hopper knows, but he’s got nothing else to lay on the table. “Maybe there’s something down there.”

“No one’s _been_ digging around,” Joyce argues. “Not since the search got called off.” The Department of Energy had torn apart the woods all the way into January, but it had only taken the police a couple of weeks to give up on looking for Mike Wheeler. Hopper had kept the file open all this time at Karen’s sole insistence, and they both knew it.

“Look, I’m not saying I’m right. I just- I got nothing else, Joyce.” Everything in Hopper’s posture reads of exasperation and exhaustion, but his voice is as soft as he can make it. “I want my gut to be wrong, believe me. But I’ve got three eyewitnesses, two parents who were told it was suicide, and a bunch of traumatized kids who are still crying murder. If there’s something rotten here, I’ve got a lot on the line. A lot of people are gonna get hurt.”

And Joyce hates it, but she knows he’s right. As much as she wants to rush back down the hall, scoop Mike up and carry him home to his friends, give him back the life he left, she _knows_ what the reality is. She knows where they live, what this town does to people, what the last two years have taught them. They have to be careful. They have to move slow.

They all have to hold their doubts just as closely as their hopes.

* * *

Mike is on his third cup of coffee – bitter, too hot – when he hears the commotion. A new voice through the hollow walls, familiar and authoritative. Hopper’s throaty grumble in response. One word – _Karen_ – and then the door is swinging open in a flurry of motion and wide-eyed faces.

He’s seen his mom without her hair done precisely once, when Holly was a newborn and his father was barely home and everything felt bad. He’d caught her on an early morning, haloed in grey light, bare-faced and undone. A single sob into half-empty coffee. It felt like something he wasn’t supposed to see, and he’d tiptoed back upstairs in silence. By the time he returned for breakfast, a couple of hours later, the mask was back on – blonde hair fresh out of pink plastic rollers, eyelashes perfectly lifted over a sunny smile.

The woman standing in the doorway now looks almost like that five o’ clock intruder. Her hair is flat and too dark, almost brown, her eyes sunken in a way that nearly mirrors Mike’s. There are tennis shoes on her feet. _She and your daddy have been beside themselves, _he can can hear Gladys Keller saying in the back of his head, and for the first time he starts to believe it. It makes no sense, and yet there’s scientific proof standing right in front of him, clutching her chest with one hand.

“Oh, my _baby_.”

He thinks it might be the first hug he’s had since October, and for several seconds he isn’t sure what to do. His arms lift uselessly beneath his mom’s grip; over her shoulder, he sees Nancy push past Hopper, the same deeply broken awe in her expression.

“_Mom_,” he tries to say, but it won’t come out. She smells wrong, her hair feels too coarse.

“You’re okay.” It’s barely more than a whisper, a quiet prayer against his shirt collar, and it makes him want to squirm away. It’s not right, it’s not _her_. “You’re okay, you’re alive.”

“Wh-what’s going on?” he finally rasps out. His mom starts to pull back, quiet platitudes behind damp eyes, wrinkled at the corners. “No one’ll tell me what’s going on.”

“You’re _home_,” his mom says – _insists_, “that’s all that matters right now.” And then Nancy is moving across the room, pale as a ghost, and her face is crinkling into something unfamiliar and gut-wrenching, and Mike just can’t _take_ it anymore. He barely registers scooting backwards, away from them, but he manages to hear the chair scraping over the rush of blood in his ears.

“What happened?” It just seems to wound them more, striking like a spark, and Mike’s chest tightens. “Why won’t anyone-” 

“Mike,” Nancy starts, her voice faint and cautious and heartbroken, but he’s had enough of listening to _nothing_, of watching people gape and fawn and cry without giving him a single answer. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that something’s _wrong_, that something horrible has happened, and the panic is welling up in his chest more with each second, clawing back his breath. _Two years, two years_, Hopper’s gruff voice repeats, and he wants to scream at him to–

“Shut _up_!” 

It echoes in the room for a second, and then longer in Mike’s own head, a shameful bell tolling. The hurt and bewilderment is instant in his mother’s eyes, and he knows right away that this is _different_. Because the mother he knows – the mother he left this morning, still asleep – wouldn’t be looking at him like that right now, with so much raw sorrow. She’d be clicking her tongue, narrowing her eyes, grounding him for a month, but not-

“Mom, I…”

Karen Wheeler is out of the room in seconds, muttering an apology to no one, wiping her coat sleeve across her nose. The tight-hinged door swings shut behind her, clicking with an awful finality, leaving him and Nancy in a silent, sniffling stalemate.

His sister looks the same, mostly. Maybe her hair is straighter, or her makeup darker; Mike had never paid much attention. He had always assumed that was mutual, but the piercing way she looks at him, like she’s trying to pick out what’s wrong, what’s _off_, makes him feel horribly seen. It makes him want to hide.

“Are you okay?” she finally asks, when the quiet has gotten heavy and unbearable for them both.

“Yeah,” Mike mutters, looking down at his sneakers. The chief’s voice carries in from the hall for just a moment, but it’s too muffled to understand.

“God.” Nancy rubs at her arms, shoulders folding in awkwardly. The voices outside shift and fade; Hopper must have taken their mother to his office. “You’ve gotten so tall,” she adds after a second, a bit lamely. It’s an olive branch, an offer for him to say more.

He takes it, throat clenching around all the words he wants to say, all the words he knows this not-sister in front of him isn’t going to accept. “I don’t remember not being here,” he settles on. It’s rushed, a bit muffled.

“… What?” Concern in her eyes, a little bit of alarm. All the classic traces of _He’s lost it_ and _I should get Mom_.

Mike bites his lip, tastes blood. “I don’t know what everyone’s talking about.” He tries to say it just above a whisper, so there’s no chance of his mom or Hopper hearing, but slow-building panic drives his voice louder. Saying it like this somehow makes it _real_. “I don’t know _any_thing. Why won’t they let me just go _home_? Why did it take you and Mom so long to get here?”

“You…” Nancy blinks; her eyes are full of apologies when she answers: “Mike, we moved to Kentucky.”

“_What_?” It tears out of him, too high and too frightened; he can feel the storm in his head coming back. His heart beats out of rhythm, nauseating and unsteady behind his ribs. “When?”

Nancy purses her lips, clearly trying to hold calm. “August. Before school.”

“Bullshit.” Mike looks away, looks back, looks up at Nancy. “That’s- I don’t-” Words stick in his throat, and it takes him a second to realize they’re catching on tears. He feels like cornered prey, so on-edge that his muscles ache with it.

“Hopper said you were confused. That you’d maybe hit your head.” It’s resignation, or consolation, for one or both of them. She’s found her baby brother, and he’s fucked up. He’s broken. He’s not the right one. Mike squeezes his eyes closed.

“I was _here_ in August, Nancy.” He wipes his face and furrows his brow, like anger will hide the desperation, the complete breakdown he feels coming. “I started ninth grade, at Hawkins High. You told me not to talk to you in the halls. I was _here._”

“Mike…” Nancy’s voice trembles openly now. Her arms wrap tighter around herself like a shock blanket. “I haven’t seen you since 1983. No one has.”

The terrible truth he knows, the one he’s been staring at all day – but now it’s plainer. It’s out in the open, on his sister’s devastated face, on the folder Hopper took back to his office.

Two years. _Two years_. 

Mike wants to scream, or sob, or run. Instead he manages, “What happened in 1983?” His own voice sounds distant, like it’s coming from the other end of a tunnel, or from outside of a dream. He wonders briefly, stupidly, if that’s what this is. He fell off his bike, he hit his head, and none of this has been real.

Nancy shakes her head, dismal and grave. “I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“_Please_.” His voice is too loud now, he knows, and any moment someone will hear them, but Mike’s stopped caring. He wants answers, and he wants his bike, and he wants his _real_ mom, and he wants this all to be over. “Please, Nancy.” Like he’s begging for cash, or for a ride, only nothing has ever mattered as much as this.

For a second Nancy looks like she’s going to refuse. Zip her lips, leave the room, come back with a team of adults. _He’s lost it_. But as soon as Mike spots the glint of a fresh tear in the corner of one eye, he knows he’s gotten her. He’s won.

Her voice on the edge of breaking, Nancy looks at him and says: “You jumped off a cliff.”

* * *

**November 12, 1983**

It isn’t how he thought it would be. Somewhere in the back of his imagination, he’d expected time to slow, music to swell, everything to seem _bigger_. Sunlight would glint off quarry rocks as the gears in his head turned, turned, _calculated_. And then, three inches taller against a Hollywood-blue horizon, he would leap forward like an action hero. He would grab Mike from mid-air, haul him easily to safety, and shoot a witty threat back at their stunned assailants.

Only, time doesn’t slow. Space doesn’t stretch. Mike steps into the sky and disappears, dropping like a pebble. In the time it takes Dustin to blink, the whole thing is over. There’s no teetering on the edge, no last panicked catch of eyes. Mike is there, and then Mike is gone, and the blood is rushing too hard in Dustin’s head to understand what happens next. James and Troy escape in hoarse, panicked shouts – “If you say a word, you’re fucking _dead_!” – and at some point the world tilts, and rough ground presses against his knees. But the next thing Dustin knows for sure is the stretch of blue water far below him, hands digging into the dry ground as he peers over.

_“Mike_!”

It echoes - _Mike, Mike, Mike _– and for a desperate second it sounds like a cry for help, deep in the quarry. But there’s no small, sopping figure on the rocks, or on the shore, or flailing in the lake. The only ripples Dustin can see soon draw still, until the surface is as smooth as the sky.

_If you say a word, you’re fucking dead_. 

It isn’t much of a threat, Dustin thinks. Because even if he believed it, even if he still had room in his chest for that kind of fear, he knows he couldn’t keep this inside. The horror is already rising like bile, and it’s something he’s never felt before, not even when Will was pulled from the lake. It’s sick and it’s terrible, the kind of darkness that you know is going to change everything. It doesn’t creep around the edges; it floods right through the middle of you, paints itself across your vision.

Then, somehow, through the spreading dimness: a voice.

“Dustin?”

Quiet, halting. A mouth feeling out a new name. A pair of borrowed sneakers scuffing up dust. Eleven steps off of the path, into the high grass, wading through the horror of the scene with wide, confused eyes. But Dustin looks up at her, backlit by late afternoon, and he knows. They both know.

Something shattering has happened, and she was a minute too late.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait!! Don't get fanfic ideas halfway through a semester of law school, you guys.
> 
> This is the first chapter to have portions in both universes, so pay attention to the "Side A" and "Side B". "A" is the canon universe, and "B" is the alternate one. 
> 
> xx ghost

** Side B **

The clock over the stove is just blinking seven o’ clock when Will bustles in, shoes tracking mud across the holiday doormat. The kitchen is dark, but the air smells like fresh popcorn, and he can hear a muffled radio jingle playing from upstairs. Something feels _off_, just enough that an electric buzz of a shudder goes up his neck.

“Mom?” The jingle ends, melts into the first familiar beats of a song. “El?” A squeak of the floorboards overhead, and he repeats her name – louder, more urgent – as he makes for the staircase, adrenaline starting to thrum in his veins. “_El?_”

A door squeaks, and at once light and sound pour down the stairs – the yellow glow from El’s lamps, the staticky bassline of “Under Pressure”, Max Mayfield’s voice singing along distractedly. El is a silhouette in the middle of it, wiping popcorn crumbs from her lip.

“Will?”

Relief, though limited. “Hey,” he answers, climbing the last few creaky steps, edging past his own bedroom. “What’s going on? Where’s mom?” _The grocery store, work, the station_ – he can already hear all of the logical answers, everything his brain rejects until he _knows_, until he has proof. And with a quiet, understanding glance, El confirms.

“Station.” She smiles one of her endlessly gentle smiles and steps to the side, inviting Will in. The room is cold, and a few moving boxes are still stacked against the closet’s accordion doors, but everything else feels warm. It feels like _friends_. The “Endless Summer” poster over her bed, the LEGO police station she and Dustin had built, a dog-eared copy of _Treasure Island _that used to belong to Lucas. Little traces of their year, of them welcoming her into their world for good.

“So.” Max flips over on the bed; she’s wearing one of El’s sweaters. “What’s the verdict?”

“I’m a neutral party.” Will drops his backpack by the door, trying to look long-suffering and put-upon, but he can’t help smiling at his friend’s dramatically pleading eyes. “I can’t pick sides.”

“Come _on_, dude! You’re our man inside! At _least_ tell me Lucas is getting his ass kicked.”

The bet had been made three days ago, over their raucous little lunch table in the corner. Lucas, mouth full of cardboard cafeteria pizza, putting his _Thundercats_ #1 on the line with a promise that he could make the highest grade on his biology midterm. Dustin had been the only taker; they’d been neck-and-neck all semester, while the others sat back in the B’s and C’s.

It hasn’t been easy, the last two years, but sometimes a moment like that will come along, so unexceptionally youthful, that he forgets why there’s an empty chair beside him.

“Lucas is getting his ass kicked,” Will answers dutifully after a moment.

El shakes her head, and sits down in her desk chair, feet tucked up. “No, he’s not.” It’s deadpan, but there’s a hint of a smile in one dimpled cheek. She doesn’t need her powers to know; the two have spent enough time together since last winter that each other’s quirks and tells just translate naturally.

“Oh my _god_.” The bedsprings give a groan as Max sits up, wiggling her feet a bit in time to the music – _It never rains but it pours, ee do ba be- _“You guys are already twins.”

It makes El smile, and it makes Will shiver, because they both know why they’re so close, why they sometimes feel like they’re the same person in two bodies. It’s not about their parents’ fresh relationship, or their shared midnight snacks in the new house. It starts with a monster’s silhouette against a streetlight and ends with her stepping out of a fairytale and into his life, each of them a reminder of a boy they both lost.

Will rubs at his arms and looks over his shoulder. “What did mom say, exactly?” The uncertainty is still settled hard in his stomach, the feeling that something isn’t _normal_.

Ever the eidetic reciter, El tilts her head: “Something came up and Hop needs an extra set of hands. Home around dark.” It’s been dark for almost an hour, and Will’s concern is apparently clear on his face.

“Hey.” Max sits up, her voice easy. “It’s alright. Just hang out here with us. Have some popcorn.” She tosses a piece over, and it pings off of Will’s jacket and into some laundry.

“Joyce is bringing pizza.” Another not-psychic revelation. El spins the chair around, and her hair whirls out.

“Are you staying?” Will starts to ask Max, but the words are still forming in his throat when he hears the grumble of a familiar truck. Headlights shine into the room, glaring in the vanity mirror.

“Hop.” El stands up, crunching the stray popcorn with her wool socks. Another pair of lights follow the first, and sputter wanly to a stop.

“Mom,” Will adds, following behind

With a bright smile, Max throws in, “Pizza.”

The front door is already creaking open when Will sidles past El, into the hallway, but only one figure enters. Hopper, exhausted and tense, not pausing to slip off his boots by the mat. He looks right at the kids on the landing and lets out a beleaguered breath.

“Back upstairs.” He climbs the first few steps, one hand on the rail, and Will can see just how _pained_ something in his face looks. Panic thrums back through his own chest. “Max, can I talk to these two alone?”

Surprised but obedient, Max throws her friends a look (_Jesus fuck, what’s up?_) and skitters back into El’s bedroom. The hall is left dark and quiet; El reaches out for Will’s hand, just two fingers linking through his.

“What’s wrong?” Will is almost surprised by his own voice, as tight and useless as his throat feels. He thinks about another night, another adult asking to see him alone, sitting next to his hospital bed and telling him the worst thing he thought he’d ever hear.

He wonders if Hopper’s going to lie, too.

El squeezes Will’s fingers, catching onto the rising urgency. “Joyce?”

“Joyce is-” Hopper shakes his head, runs a palm over his beard. “Your mom’s fine, nothing-”

“_Jonathan_?”

“Everyone’s _fine_.” The Chief is treading between impatience and genuine distress. “No one’s hurt or dead. I just need you to _listen_ for a second.” His voice drops into something almost secretive as he leads them up another two steps. “Look, we’re still trying to figure out what’s going on, so you two need to keep this quiet. Just between the people in this house.”

Will’s heart pounds; he feels nauseated with the anxious anticipation. “What are you-”

But the front door bursts open again in a flurry of movement, led by his mother, her nose bright red from the cold. Her brow cuts into a deep furrow the second she steps over the threshold, peering up the stairs at her family.

“_Hop_, I meant-” Joyce looks over her shoulder, holds up a hand at someone unseen. “I meant take them in a _room_, or something! Not right by the _door_!”

“I thought you were coming in the _back_!”

“Can I come out yet?” Max’s voice, muffled through the door.

A hand to her face, Joyce looks back outside, says something that sounds a lot like, “Karen.” It sets the gears in Will’s brain grinding again, trying desperately to hold onto clues, parse through secrets. There’s another muffled voice outside – _two_ muffled voices, too soft to hear – and surely his heart is going to crack right through his ribs.

“Will,” Hop says, his tense voice trying to be something so gentle, impossibly tender. “El-” But Joyce steps out of the doorway, steps past the stairs, and Will watches with disbelieving eyes as three people enter the front room.

He can still remember the Wheelers of his childhood, before everything changed. Their house always warm, always wide-open, always smelling a little like cookies and Mrs. Wheeler’s flowery perfume, instead of cigarettes and must. Then later, towards the end – baby wipes, raised voices. White wine glasses left on the sideboard. 

The Karen Wheeler of _after_ doesn’t look like a woman who wears Estée Lauder; Will knows this already, from the days during the divorce when he and his brother had taken over casseroles and helped her with the yard. He knows the way Nancy’s delicate face had turned dour, the way her graceful dancer’s walk had gone flat-footed and stormy. The way she barely seemed to see Jonathan, after only one of them took a baby brother home that night in 1983. The Wheeler women march in together, a joint front of dark hair and hard eyes, and Will is looking over to his own mom for an answer when he _sees_. 

Pale face, wild hair, Hopper’s tan jacket over a red sweater. Disjointed images backlit by streetlights. That’s all he notices for a moment, and later, when he’s cried himself to sleep in El’s bed, he’ll feel the _wrongness_ of it. For two years, he’d thought that he’d know Mike Wheeler anywhere, anyhow. No matter how much time passed, no matter how much he had changed. If he was somehow alive, if he ever walked back into this world, Will would _know_ him, just like he’s always known him.

Instead, it’s El who recognizes him first. “_Mike_?”

The boy turns – dark eyes, galactic freckles, the last words they said under a flickering garage light – and Will’s heart stops.

Then, he runs.

* * *

_ <strike>r e w i n d</strike> _

**November 22, 1983**

“Radio not working?”

Will slides his thumb off the button, and the static cuts to silence. “It’s fine.” It’s not. He’s pretty sure it never will be, but that’s not what Jonathan needs to hear. That’s not what he can tell their mom, when she bustles in to feel his forehead, smooth his hair back, make sure he’s eaten his lunch. They went through hell for him, and they deserve to feel like they won.

He thinks, maybe, they’re the only people who do.

Jonathan closes the door behind himself and moves to sit on the very corner of the bed, barely making an impression. His face is sallow, pinched, burdened with everything that’s happened in the last month, and Will doesn’t want to add more. But then he feels a hand on his ankle, just a brush through the quilt, a promise – _Nothing you have to say is going to be too much_. A relic from their childhood, when they both swallowed down poisonous grief while hiding from their parents’ shouts. _Keeping it inside will be worse_, Jonathan had always said, and he was right.

“Dustin and Lucas said…” Will’s voice trembles, and he hates it. He tries to swallow the weakness down, keep steady. “They said they heard me on the radio, when I was gone. I keep thinking…”

“That maybe you’ll hear him?” Jonathan says it so easily, so simply, that it almost sounds possible. It almost sounds like it’s not the fantasy of a boy who’s gone completely mad.

“It’s stupid.”

“It’s _not_.” Jonathan scoots up the bed a little. There’s comfort in his eyes, but pity is tucked close behind them, and that stings. “It’s not stupid, Will. If it’s important to you, and it makes you feel better, that’s all that matters.”

“It _is_ stupid,” Will shoots back, and he feels his eyes starting to well up again, embarrassing and traitorous. “I wasn’t really-” A pause. A breath. He doesn’t want to say it, but no one else has, not since the hospital. “I wasn’t dead when they heard me, and Mike’s-” The first sob sneaks up on him, and his chest heaves with the sudden burst of grief, so awful and acute that his vision tunnels.

In a heartbeat, Jonathan’s already moved, already wrapped his arms around Will, pulling him close. He smells like sweat and their mom’s cigarettes and the fast food they had for dinner, and Will wants to be comforted by it, but he’s not. There’s only one thing that can comfort him, and it’s somewhere at the bottom of Sattler’s.

“I should have been there,” he protests, barely a whisper, hitched by the shudder in his chest. “I should have _saved_ him.” It’s dumb, and it’s childish, and he can’t stop holding on it.

“I know it’s hard to understand.” Jonathan’s voice is a buzz against Will’s hair. “But it’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.” _An accident_, everyone’s been saying, until it’s stopped registering as a word to Will’s overwhelmed ears. “Even if you’d been there, he still might have made that choice. And it’s not because he didn’t want to be here with you guys, okay?”

“… What?” Will pulls back, just a hair, just enough to see Jonathan’s face. “What choice?” _To look for me? To go to the quarry? _

Something in Jonathan seems to hesitate, and then he asks, “Do you know what depression is?” It’s a voice Will’s heard before, just a few times. It’s, _Do you know what alcohol is? Do you know what divorce is? _It’s a horror movie overture, his orbit shifting, a collision course towards something terrible.

He feels himself nod. He doesn’t want to; he wants to close his eyes, will himself into unconsciousness. Find Mike, wherever he is in deep black nonexistence, and burrow against him.

“It makes someone feel really, really sad,” Jonathan’s saying, like a voice from a high-above PA, “even if there’s nothing to be said about. Their brain makes them think things that aren’t true, or do things to hurt themselves.”

_Why are you telling me this_? Will wants to ask, but his jaw feels locked. He just shakes his head. No, _no_. This isn’t the answer. “Mike wasn’t-” he finally says, strained and damp with tears, but Jonathan cuts him off, as gently as possible.

“He was really sick, Will.” _No, no, **no**. _“He just didn’t tell anyone.”

It’s worse than the hospital, somehow. Worse than his mom leaning in close, brushing his hair aside – _There was an accident_. Worse than Dustin and Lucas walking in, somber but grateful, hugging Will close – _Did you hear? _He’d heard, his mom had told him.

His mom had lied.

“She said he _fell_.” It’s an accusation, a horror, a heartbreak. He pulls out of Jonathan’s arms, gasping for a shallow breath. For a second he feels like he’s back down there, back in that thing’s nest, something terrible filling up his throat – and for another second he _wishes_ he was, because at least when he was there, he thought Mike might still save him. He hadn’t known that Mike was already gone.

“Shit,” Jonathan breathes, his own face gone stark white. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Will.” He whispers it again and again, into the air between them, and then against Will’s shoulder as he hauls him back close, tries to soothe the uncontrollable shaking. He whispers it and he whispers it, until the last orange of the sunset fades away, until Will falls into a fitful sleep, until the words don’t sound like words anymore.

* * *

** Side A.  **   
  


**Present**

It’s chicken again. Made fresh, not reheated. The glass of pinot grigio in her mother’s hand has been refilled at least twice, and Nancy is nursing a headache just from the constant motion in and out (and in, and out) of the kitchen. Stove, phone, table. Stove, phone-

“That was Mr. Bradley. The camera down there caught someone going past around seven.” Karen drops a dish of green peas down on the table; it _clunks_ just a fraction too hard.

Nancy is incredulous. “That’s the _only_ camera on Wabash?” For half a second, she wishes the lab was still up and running; at least that way, they could count on some surveillance. The camera at the Big Buy would have been checked at eight this morning. A hundred government agents would have known precisely where her brother was before he managed to skip town.

“They put it up last year,” her dad offers, answering precisely nothing, “after the Russian girl busted their door.” He seems to find his own contribution satisfying and reaches for a dinner roll, tearing into it with slow, indulgent voracity.

“Can we go see it?”

“The camera?” Karen asks. She brings in another dish; carrots, lovingly honey glazed.

“No, the _video_.”

“They said it was too blurry to make out.”

_Jesus Christ_. Nancy wants to scream, or be sick, or possibly both. “Couldn’t they tell which way he was _going_?”

“South.” Distracted, buzzing, empty. “Holly, sweetie, use your fork.”

Something in Nancy’s chest _snaps_. She shoves back her chair with a scrape against the linoleum, her tongue heavy with swears and condemnations and her brother’s name, and makes for the stairs.

“Nancy-” her mother calls, exasperated, but she doesn’t stop until she’s climbed two-by-two, chest tight with anger, into the dark upstairs hall. What finally makes her stop isn’t her parents’ voices, or any twinge of regret.

It’s Mike’s door.

No one’s opened it since this morning, when her parents made their preliminary determinations, listed the missing items, sealed it back off. The sight is like a fist around Nancy’s throat. She’s watched movies, read human interest pieces - bedrooms, vacuum-tight, unused reminders for years and years. For a second, she pictures Mike’s room years in the future, a dusty museum of relics. Winter, 1985, in a time capsule.

No. No, that’s not like their mom. She’d clean it out, empty it into the basement, turn it into something else. Something she can use, something she can show to people.

Nancy turns the knob and pushes into the room.

She’s not sure when she was last inside, but it has to have been months by now, maybe even a year. Most of the Tinker Toys and action figures have been swept off the shelf, replaced by books, projects, empty soda glasses gone sticky. The floor is a minefield of laundry and crumpled papers; she unearths one, flattens it out with her foot – a math quiz. C-minus. But next to it, kicked halfway under her brother’s bed, is something more concerning.

A long piece of black plastic, and several AAA batteries.

It takes her a moment to realize what she’s looking at. One side has an open panel over an empty battery compartment, and the other sports several wires, a couple of them clipped and frayed. Then, just above the hand strap, in little white letters: ᴄɪᴛɪᴢᴇɴs ʜᴀɴᴅ ᴛʀᴀɴsᴄᴇɪᴠᴇʀ. Part of Mike’s walkie talkie.

“He ran away once before.”

Nancy feels her nerves jump. Unconsciously, she clenches the piece of plastic tighter, until it digs into her palm; something in her stomach feels oddly protective over her find, like it’s a tiny part of Mike that her parents aren’t allowed to touch.

“What?” Her mother is a sliver of pressed cotton-blend in the corner of her eye, and Nancy needs to make sense of _something_.

Karen steps inside, feet quietly bypassing her son’s belongings. There’s something too eerily guarded about her voice, about the arms crossed over the front of her sweater. Up here, away from the busy duty of downstairs, the edge of her mouth trembles. “You were at dance camp.”

Four summers ago. 1981. Nancy feels the breath go cold and sharp in her lungs. “You should have told me.” Then, yesterday, at _some_ point.

“He was only gone a few hours.” Her mom chews carefully at one lip, twists the ring on her finger. It’s a familiar nervous tic, muted under her practiced façade. “Joyce found him out in the woods with a backpack full of comic books.” 

_But what if she hadn’t?_ The question burns in the back of Nancy’s mouth. She can picture herself at thirteen, down in Bloomington, getting a summons from the camp director. Her life changing forever, two years too early.

“What happened?” she asks instead, still looking at the carpet.

“He was upset. You know how he gets.”

_You know how he gets_. Soothing, dismissive. It hits like a meteorite, rattling Nancy’s constraint. The words that tear out of her are too harsh, too sharp. “Aren’t you and dad even _worried_?”

“Sweetheart…” The gentle shock on Karen’s face still isn’t enough. It’s like she’s been so afraid of breaking something, afraid of being heard by someone. Afraid of shattering the game of pretend. “I know we’re not always the best at it, but your father and I love you and Michael and Holly _very_ much.”

“He left the batteries here.” Nancy finally chokes it out like a bad pill, melting bitter on her tongue. She thrusts the radio backing out so hard the panel clacks. “He left his _coat_ here, in the basement. Something’s _really_ wrong, mom.”

To her credit, Karen almost looks rattled, like the building panic has found a crack to the surface. Her throat seems to work for a second, before she swallows some of the fear back down and shakes her head. “He took the blue coat,” she replies. Nancy can almost hear her dad’s voice behind it, the simpering placations of the other moms. “I don’t see the blue one any-”

“He gave the blue one away, last winter.” El had almost grown into it, before the move.

“The _green_ one, then.”

Still hanging over the basement sofa. Her parents hadn’t even noticed.

“He should have been going to a doctor,” Nancy continues, her voice starting to strain and tremble with held-back anger. “He should have been talking to someone, or-”

Her mom shakes her head, like she’s trying to wave the words away, fit them back into their neat story. “He was doing _better_, after Thanksgiving.”

And maybe he had been, Nancy thinks, but it would have been a meager blessing. Mike’s been up-and-down for two years now, maybe more, and she hates how long it took for her to realize that there was something so _wrong_ about it. The way he would just disappear from their lives, collapse into himself, ignore his friends’ calls until they came knocking on the door, timidly asking Nancy if Mike was mad at them. The way he would bounce his legs like they were on fire, jolt violently away from contact. The way he would stay awake in the basement for days and nights on end, unnoticed by their parents while he tinkered and scribbled and prattled on his radio, rings under his eyes growing deeper all the while. 

“Maybe you should have been looking closer,” Nancy finally bites, hating herself more than a little. Then, she drops the radio backing onto the floor, silent among the hurricane debris of Mike’s life, and leaves her mother alone.

* * *

“What does that say? Is that even English?”

“Your handwriting _sucks_, Mayfield.”

“I don’t see either of _you_ clowns writing it.” The paper nearly rips as Max tugs it away, bearing down on Dustin’s biology textbook with her felt tip pen. It bleeds and blots, turning what might have said _government_ into something that nearly looks French, full of slurry vowels. The next word is only slightly clearer – _baddies_.

Lucas tilts his head, squints a bit. “Why are you putting my name by-”

“So we know whose fault it is when we wind up hunting down false leads.”

The Hendersons’ house is familiar, homey; next to the paneled walls and the fading smell of Hamburger Helper, the bullet-point list triangulated between the kids seems uncomfortably dark, like a secret none of them want to know. Two out of three hands had vetoed writing _Operation Saving Throw _across the top, in the interest of seriousness, but the sight of the paper still makes Lucas’ legs _itch_ to move.

They’ve done this shit before. They’ve marched out into the woods, into the tunnels, into the mall with their arms full of fireworks, and the crazy thing is - it’s always _worked_. They’ve always won, and they’ve never had a goddamn _list_. His stomach flutters with the need to run at this the same way, to just smear on his war paint, tie on his banana, get _out_ there.

Max makes a second bullet point. “What’s next?”

“El says it’s a monster.” The second problem: something’s off about Dustin. He doesn’t say _monster_ like he’s mentally flipping through his D&D binder, like the words _yeth hound_ are about to come out of his mouth, followed by a flurry of numbers and abbreviations that they’ll both watch Max refuse to parse.

He says it like he doesn’t believe himself.

“Will?” Lucas continues, but his interest is fatally distracted. He’s already set on his vote.

“'Undetermined'. His word, not mine.” Hardly a word, really, from Max’s chicken-scratch handwriting. “And Dustin, also undecided?”

“I’m keeping an open mind,” the boy throws in, fiddling with a fiber of loose carpeting, yanking it loose with too much aggression.

“You can’t investigate an _open mind_.” This is getting them precisely nowhere. Lucas’ objection goes wholly unnoticed, however – Dustin has leaned in to decipher the last bullet point, frowning as the alien scrawls start to form a word.

“You really think he ran away?” Dustin’s voice sounds like betrayal, or somber resignation; Lucas is too wired to tell, and the noncommittal shrug Max gives in reply just makes him more on-edge.

“Kids do it all the time.” Then, worse: “I did.”

He had been prepared to argue (_Yeah, on TV!_), to shoot down what Max thinks she might know about Mike, their clumsy-armed captain who would curse out adults and throw flimsy punches but would never, _never_ let down his friends. But it all dies in his throat, dried up with a new, horrible thought.

“You-” He doesn’t get to ask why. Max whirls right back into her list, holding it up against the yellow glow from the ceiling light.

“So – three leads, and two open minds.”

Dustin gives a slow, tired shrug. “I’d say we could look at the mall, but we’d have to get _in_ first.” Even five months later, the ruins are still a fortress of yellow tape. Davey Ballard, down the street, claimed he’d snuck in and saw the bodies, but even the people who weren’t there knew he was horseshit. There wouldn’t have been bodies, a girl in first period geometry had argued, citing someone-or-another’s friend’s firefighter uncle. Stick a person in a fire that hot, and all that’s left is ash and fat.

“Lab would be easier,” Lucas says after a moment; he doesn’t want to go back in the mall anyway, whether or not Ballard’s story is true. “It’s abandoned.”

Max huffs, her eyebrows raised. “Only if you wanna go missing _too_.”

“This isn’t a_bout_ us.” The air feels charged, and it’s all Lucas can do not to hop up and _leave_. “A member of the Party is-“

“In trouble, I _know_!” Pen and paper drop to the carpet between them; Max rocks back on her feet, frustrated. “And every other time, we’ve had a _hell_ of a lot more going for us. Do you _see_ anyone here with superpowers? Or anyone over fourteen, for that matter?”

A quick pause, a shift of eyes. Dustin shakes his head.

“We aren’t breaking into the lab with a slingshot,” Max continues, but something’s already been lit in Lucas’ chest.

“Then we get everyone back here!” He can hear the hint of a whine in his voice and he _hates_ it, but he keeps going, keeps trying to feel that fire he always pictured Mike drawing on during his best speeches. “Guys, we’ve killed _monsters_ before. We’ve literally saved the world. We can save _Mike_.”

In the silence that follows, Dustin chews on his lip and casts his eyes over at Max. Dark doubt lines his every feature. “When you ran away… where did you go?”

A sharp shrug, a bit little defensive in the wake of Lucas’ outburst. “Sometimes you just go to _go_.”

“That’s stupid,” Lucas mutters, only adding to the churning discomfort in his stomach. This isn’t something he knows about; his childhood was idyllic, protected and nurtured at every turn, right up until the Monday morning Mrs. Byers called, looking for her son. He never had a thought about leaving any of it.

Max just looks at him, patience rapidly dwindling. “Was El going anywhere when she escaped the lab?”

“No, but-“ _What does Mike have to escape from? _He can’t reason it in his head. Hawkins is a shithole, sure, but Mike isn’t alone in it.

“I’m going to get more chips.” Dustin starts to stand up, the plastic bowl in one hand; it’s only half-empty, but Max’s knowing expression is warning enough not to mention that. She stays silent, lips pressed together, as Dustin leaves the room; for a moment, as the door opens and closes, the sound of Mrs. Henderson’s TV program drifts in, muffled and indistinct.

“He’s taking it really hard.” Max’s voice is gentler than before. It extinguishes some of the fire in Lucas’ veins, just enough that he can settle back against the bedframe.

“Yeah,” he agrees. It’s been rough on them all, but there’s something _different_ in the way Dustin’s reacted. Something darker, almost. “His mom watches those police shows. Keeps talking about the first forty-eight.”

One red-orange eyebrow slants up in confused interest. “The first forty-eight _what_?” But before Lucas can give an answer, there’s a shout from down the hallway. It cuts through his stomach, setting off an intuitive alarm he doesn’t quite understand. 

_Bad news, bad news. You were wrong, Lucas Sinclair_.

A creak of floorboards, and then Dustin bursts back into the bedroom.

“They found something!”

* * *

_“-_ _w_ _as located in a creek in Huntington County, about seven miles south of Hawkins. Investigators have identified the bike as belonging to Michael Wheeler, a fourteen-year-old who was reported missing earlier today, and say they now have reason to believe the boy is endangered. Anyone who was in the area of Widow Pond and Burt’s Towers and Flowers this morning is asked to call Hawkins Police Department’s non-emergency line with any-“ _

* * *

** Side B. **

Three o’ clock comes and goes before Mike gives up.

Jonathan’s room is spartan compared to the one Mike remembers, cluttered and unruly, loud music always rattling out of an old stereo. The walls here are off-white white, patched with scant posters that can’t hide the _wrong_ness. Cardboard boxes, taped and labeled, crowd into the corner, hiding everything Mike knows he would recognize.

The photo tacked over the nightstand is the worst of all. Jonathan with his arm around some black-haired girl, a high-schooler Mike’s seen around. Samantha. He’s staying at her house tonight, Joyce had said, leaving a bed open for company.

Company. Mike is company, delegated to an empty slot in a round of musical chairs, while two of his best friends sleep in their own beds in this alien house. _We moved about a month ago_, Joyce had said earlier, crowded into the hospital waiting room. Banal conversation to keep his mind off being stuck and prodded and evaluated for so many hours. _Just to the other side of town. Room for all five of us_.

He wonders if Hopper’s cabin is still destroyed, here. He wonders if there’s a way to ask, without giving away all that he knows.

The blow-up mattress on the floor gives a groan, and his mom takes a whistling breath. She’d fallen asleep hard after a glass of wine and something from Joyce’s medicine cabinet; all day her nerves had been in in a state Mike had never seen them, and it had put a permanent twist in his stomach. He’d long thought of his parents as unshakeable, unmovable to every plight of their children, and the thought that _he’d_ done it is the most awful part of it all.

Exhibit A for this being a nightmare. Some horrific, comatose vision after falling off of his bike.

The digital clock hits half-past, and Mike finally sits up, in need of solitude and a sip of water. The kitchen is just outside Jonathan’s tiny back bedroom, a short, bare-footed walk on cold floors, and it’s a small blessing that he manages to make it without waking his mother, slipping into the unfamiliar room like a ghost.

But, with a jolt to his chest, he finds it already occupied by one. 

He hasn’t seen Will since earlier, when the boy scurried up the stairs and behind a slammed door, stunned by the clumsily handled reunion. Mike can’t say that he blames him; if Barb Holland or Bob Newby walked in the door right now, he would probably run as well, unsure what part of his mind had just shat itself to call up such a realistic vision. By midnight though, when Joyce finally shuffled a wide-eyed and talkative El off to bed – _not his, just barely wrong _– he’d started to feel resentment seep into his stomach.

It all vanishes when he looks over and sees Will standing at the sink, eating a slice of cold pizza over a paper towel, frozen solid.

“Hey,” Mike tries, but it comes out clumsy and hoarse. He knows he looks a wreck, folded into Jonathan’s too-small pajamas, his face bruised and his hair wild. But as Will studies him in growing, silent disconcertment, it finally _hits_ Mike.

He’s a stranger. He’s a stranger to Will, in every single way. His own best friend – this version of him, at least – hasn’t seen him since that last game of D&D, before the Demogorgon, when they were both twelve and chubby-cheeked and so _stupid_, unaware their lives were about to fall completely and irreparably apart.

And so suddenly, swift as a bully’s fist to the face, Mike wants to cry.

“Hi,” Will finally answers, fingers clutching his pizza crust like some kind of lifeline. His face looks blue in the shadows, quiet and devastated and every age at once, a slideshow of what Mike did to him. What he didn’t _mean_ to do to him.

Mike shuffles his feet, staying stock-still in the kitchen doorway. “Are you-” A dry swallow. “Are you okay?”

He knows at once that it’s a stupid question, that it means _nothing_ to either of them in the face of what’s happened to today. Either he’s lost in some unconscious fantasy, or he’s really left his friends behind for two years thanks to his own recklessness, and neither of those seem any better than the other.

Will works his jaw around an answer for a second, blinking incredulous eyes. Then, finally: “Mike, you- you were _dead_.”

It’s just above a whisper, but it feels like it shakes the house. In some nonsensical sliver of his mind, Mike is half-surprised that no one comes running from upstairs, feeling the tremors in their beds.

“I wasn’t.” It’s useless, helpless, but he doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m _not_.”

Unsatisfied, Will puts down the paper towel and takes a restrained step forward, chin held steady against tears that Mike can nearly _feel_. “What _happened_?”

The question on everyone’s lips, and Mike still doesn’t know where to begin his answer. It’s what’s kept him awake all night, staring holes in Jonathan’s ceiling. “I can’t-”

“Why _not_?” Quietly panicked, more than upset. The same tone as Mike’s mom, as his sister. El had been different, her eyes curious and prying instead of desperate, like she could sense the answer somewhere just under Mike’s denials.

He doesn’t want to tell lies. Lies just weave more lies, a web he knows he can’t control, not when it’s this serious. Because if there’s one thing he knows about his friends, it’s that they don’t sit idly. The first hint that he’s been endangered by someone or something, and they’ll be on their feet, out the door, heading for the ruins of the lab.

But if he tells the truth…

He swallows again, shaking his head, steeling for more hushed interrogation, more cautious stares from someone who has been permanently entrenched in his heart for almost a decade-

Only Will doesn’t say anything. With a choked sound that barely makes it out of his throat, he rushes forward resolutely and wraps his arms around Mike. Ten fingers press into the borrowed T-shirt, press all the way into Mike’s heart, and he finally lets out the breath he’d been holding all night. All _day_, maybe since October.

“I missed you.” It’s damp and muffled, whispered into Mike’s shoulder between held-back sobs. Will’s hair is too short, and it smells like the wrong shampoo, but it doesn’t stop Mike from gripping him back as tightly as he can.

“I missed you too,” he whispers, and it’s not a lie. Not all the way. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five things: 
> 
> 1\. Law school is a massive creativity killer, and after fall finals I basically forgot how to write figurative language for approximately six months. 
> 
> 2\. Sometime in march I was sitting in a zoom lecture and the entire plot suddenly resolved itself in my head, requiring me to change a million things I'd already planned out.
> 
> 3\. As a reminder, "Side A." is the canon universe, and "Side B." is the parallel universe, sorry for any confusion! 
> 
> 4\. If you want a visual in this chapter, [here](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6587642,-86.3915757,3a,75y,195.78h,83.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sF8yXLl09X_E4NQb8LdyJwg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656) is where the crash happened.
> 
> 5\. I hope you're all staying safe and taking care of yourselves!! ♥︎
> 
> Now, on with chapter five.
> 
> xx ghost

** Side A. **

December 12, 1985

“Hello?”

She’s the quietest Joyce has heard her, coming over the line like a peek around a corner, too cautious and too groggy. The white noise of a Wheeler family breakfast, always a background buzz at this hour, is nowhere to be found.

“Karen? It’s Joyce.” She sets her coffee cup down on a splay of mail – bills, always bills – and when there’s no answer, she adds, “Jonathan told me, about the-”

A shaking breath. “I thought he’d be home by now. I really _thought-_” Karen cuts off, drawn back by her own reins; Joyce can imagine the careful control on her face, the practiced grace in her posture. Dignity, heavy as an albatross, is as much a staple of Karen Wheeler as a frosty glass of white wine.

“It’s okay,” Joyce urges on clumsy instinct. “It’s okay.” A lie, and part of her feels wretched, but it’s what everyone had said to _her_, back at the beginning. When Will was merely a question, and the answer hadn’t yet been pulled out of the quarry.

“Ted never wanted the police involved.” Quieter, but not a whisper; her husband’s at work, then. “He thinks Mike’s just being difficult.”

The Wheelers’ trepidation is an alien thing; Joyce had spearheaded her own hunt, barreled into the police office not an hour after her first, desperate grasps came up empty. She can’t fathom these reaches for normalcy.

“What do _you_ think?” she prompts, slowly and carefully.

The speaker goes static with a trembling breath. “That it’s my fault.”

“Karen-”

“I’ve had so much on my plate. I’d told him he could visit Will, but then my mom broke her hip, and-”

Joyce leans against the counter, shaking her head as though anyone could see it. “No one could blame you for that,” she cuts in, but it’s an empty balm. She can hear her own thoughts, echoing across two years: _You’re the one who worked late. You’re the one who didn’t call. It’s your fault. _Anything to chart a scenario that makes sense, that works with what you know of the world, of karma and guilt and blame.

“Mike does,” Karen protests. “He blames me and Ted for _every_thing. He’s always so angry, and I don’t under_stand_.”

The portrait fills in, getting less and less recognizable. Part of Joyce wants to disagree, calling up the sweet, curly-haired kid who spent so many nights at her dinner table, who would always hold Will’s hand on the worst of days. But then, she thinks about 1984. Before the now-memories and the Mind Flayer, before the tunnels and the dogs and Bob. There had been groundings, she remembers. Weekends where Mike didn’t show and Will hung his head, where even the radio went silent.

“Sometimes you can’t understand. I mean, you remember what it was like, being their age.” Bitter, oppressed, always raging against something. Will and his friends have never seemed the type, but maybe she’s blinder than she thought. Maybe everyone is.

“I wasn’t like them.” There’s a faint sound under the electronic echo of Karen’s voice, like glass against a laminate countertop. A metallic crack, the hollow pop of a cork. Half past eight in the morning. “I wasn’t like any of my kids. Even Holly looks at us sometimes like there’s something we’re just not _getting_.” 

“They’re smart.” It’s the only answer Joyce can summon, the only thing in her chest that feels genuine. So many years of feeding and watching each other’s kids, and she has no idea how to look after Karen herself. “They got that from you.”

A harsh breath of a laugh, and for the first time it sounds damp. Control slipping, tin can crackling. “If I had half of what they have, I would have seen this coming.”

_You would have. You _should_ have. _“Or maybe not,” Joyce urges. “Maybe there weren’t any signs.” _Signs_. Signs of what? Of something she’s too afraid to say, lest she talk it into being? She knows what the kids are all whispering about over their radios. She knows what kind of monster they’re imagining, and she knows what her own gut tells her.

“Did the news say how they found it?”

The question sneaks out of left field, and Joyce merely gapes for a moment, working her jaw around an answer. “The bike?” she asks, dumb and blunt. She hadn’t seen the news, not down here in Greenwood; she had heard from Jonathan, who had heard from Nancy, who had heard from the police, who had found it just after seven o’ clock, halfway buried in muddy slush.

Karen takes a bracing breath, as though fighting back horror, and says: “It was folded in half.”

* * *

** Side B. **

The worst part, of course, was that there hadn’t been a body.

In the cold mornings after that November, as the chill blurred into frost and the rest of the world hung their own twinkling lights, Joyce had sat on her porch and thought. Thought about her family, thought about the Upside Down, and about what this town had done to that little girl. But mainly, she had thought about the Wheelers.

For a few days, she had been at the bottom of the bottom. A reckless mother who’d lost her child, who’d failed her family, who’d become the punchline of Hawkins’ cruelest joke. She’d looked across a fresh grave at Karen and Ted, and almost had the presence of mind to envy them. Whole, alive, flanked by children they would never have to see on a slab.

Only days later, her own son safe in his bedroom, Joyce had been the one bringing them noodle kugle. She had been the one laying a hand on Karen’s trembling shoulder, offering skin-deep sympathies, searching for something that wouldn’t cut. The world had flipped before she could find her footing, before she could heal the wound of losing Will, of seeing his image pale and bloated in the coroner’s basement.

The Wheelers never got that particular luxury, and she had watched it destroy them. 

_Crrrrrrk_. Rusted hinges protest as the screen door swings open, and Joyce nearly douses her cigarette on instinct, like a shamefaced teenager.

“Oh, I don’t mind.” Karen’s words puff out white as she sidles onto the back porch, a vision in threadbare sweats and her daughter’s scrunchie. She had still been asleep when Joyce had crept out, tiptoeing around their sons’ lanky, huddled forms.

“Will’s trying to get me to quit,” Joyce answers. It’s conversational; safe. It melts right into the air like empty vapor.

“Jim wants to talk to Mike again.” The porch rail protests as Karen leans into it, and she quickly recoils; Joyce makes another mental note for the repair list, already volumes long.

“We can all go down together,” she suggests. “After lunch.”

Karen shakes her head. “He said it might be easier for Mike, if I don’t go in.” A short pause, as she seems to wrestle with something, and then, in a halting voice: “In case there’s something he doesn’t want me to hear.”

“Go down anyway. Sit in the hall, if you have to.” Joyce leans in, tipping her cigarette away. Somewhere in the yard, a grackle grates out its call. “He’ll want you close, right now.” Tall and angular and strange as he’s grown, Mike is still a child; he’s going to need his mom.

Her words are met with a distant hum, a long gaze out into the foggy fields. Scrubbing her hands over her face, Karen shrugs. “It’s terrible,” she starts, voice distracted, “but I used to see parents in the news and think, maybe we got off easy. I lost my kid, and it destroyed my family, but at least… at least no one else hurt him. At least we didn’t have to sit through a trial and hear what some _sicko_ did to our baby, you know?”

Joyce doesn’t know, but she tries. She presses her eyes shut, thinks back to that worst of the worst year, and _tries_. Would she have thought herself lucky, if Will had had an accident on a clumsy ledge? Would that innocent finality have been some kind of blessing, next to all the other possibilities?

“Karen, I-”

“That’s what I’m afraid of, when I look at him.” There’s a clamor from inside, a brief din of breakfast pans and young voices, and Karen lowers her own. “I just keep thinking of everything I don’t know.”

There are a scant few inches between the cuffs of their sweaters, and something in Joyce’s stomach wants to close it, wrap an arm around this woman who’s looked the worst beast a mother can face right in the eye. But there’s a frostiness there, a decorum as old as the decades they’ve known each other, and she can’t bring herself to breach it. Time has swapped the lines on their faces, but she’s still the outcast, smoking behind the gym, and Karen is still the cheerleader, gleaming from her boyfriend’s Ford Fairlane.

“We’ll all be there, once you do.” Joyce looks over, trying a smile, but Karen doesn’t take her eyes off the swirling grey, the sunbeams cutting through into the overgrown grass. The trance remains unbroken, rumple-browed, until the screen door clatters open behind them with another tremendous creak. Hopper, cracked mug of steaming coffee in hand. A whiff of burnt toast follows him out.

“Mornin’.” His glance at Karen is wary, balanced on eggshells, but she meets it with a polite dip of her chin.

“Chief Hopper.” Always that Wheeler formality, unbroken through the worst of times. Joyce thinks of a high school art lesson, photos of cracked pottery mended with gold. Metallic light, running through the seams.

Hopper coughs, then sips his coffee too loudly. “We still thinking this is a good idea?”

The million-dollar question, ever since Mike brought it up over last night’s pizza. An uncertain frown, a stabilizing breath in the middle of picking off his pepperoni (one-by-one, a ritual Joyce remembers from his childhood). Then, as fidgety and dubious as he’d always been: _Can I see Lucas and Dustin? _

“It’s Mike’s call,” Karen says, rubbing at one temple. Her nails are unmanicured.

Joyce tips her head, peering back in through the half-open door. “Are he and Will still-”

“Passed out by the couch,” the chief provides, and both mothers pass a quick smile across the porch. It feels like something old, something so nearly lost, and Joyce swallows back the faintest prickle of tears.

“Look.” Rubbing a hand across her forehead, Karen finally turns to look up at Hopper. Something in the jut of her jaw seems ready for a battle. “If Mike wants to see his friends, let him see his friends. Who are they going to _tell_?”

“No one, I’m just…” A long-suffered sigh; Hopper closes the back door the rest of the way, drowning out their daughters’ chatter. “I’m trying to be _cautious_.”

It’s what’s logical. It’s what’s _smart_. They live in a town plagued by espionage and betrayal, by years of horrific loss, and they have a right to hold their cards – and their hearts – close to their chests. They have a right to expect the worst of this. But then, Joyce closes her eyes, thinks back to the fall of 1983. Halloween, the last night she saw them all together. There’s still a snapshot in Will’s room, four _Star Wars_ heroes in miniature, holding up their spoils in plastic buckets. One face that would so soon disappear, and three that would never be the same again.

“Keeping those kids apart is what you should be worried about.” She douses her cigarette, breathing a last lungful of smoke down into the frozen shrubs. Overhead, the grackle seems to agree.

Karen looks over, something like gratitude in her pinched face, behind the golden seams. “This town wouldn’t survive it,” she adds, and it nearly summons up a laugh in Joyce’s chest.

Sensing the matter closed, Hopper shakes his head. “Okay, okay. Fine.” It’s not short-tempered, or even frustrated, but merely the distracted tone of someone trying to solve a very complex problem in a very short time. “Next week, though. We need precautions.”

_Precautions_. Joyce wants to roll her eyes, frown up at him, rail against his doggedness like she always does. It’s how they operate, even with their cars next to each other in the driveway, their toothbrushes in the same cup. But when she looks up, about to enlist Karen’s reinforcement, she pauses. The woman is staring out at the field again, mouth frozen at the start of a thought, her brow gently rumpled.

“What?” Joyce turns to look, but all that’s there is the familiar yard, patchy grass opening up to untended field, State Route 17 unseen in the distance.

“I thought…” A blink, a breath, and Karen shakes her head, turning away from the railing. “It’s nothing. Just need some of that coffee.” She disappears through the open door, calling out to her daughter, and leaves Joyce and Hopper in silence.

* * *

**Side A.  **

For six hours, Nancy watches her mother watch the phone, tension rising steadily in her veins. She listens to the air-soft pop of a cork, the sloppy coo of platitudes at Holly. A building discomfort, heavy in dim light, as no one calls, and _still no one calls_.

At the turn of the seventh hour, she digs her keys out of her backpack and leaves. The front door slams, and she can’t imagine that anyone hears it.

In the wake of Will’s disappearance – two years ago, too fast and too slow – Hawkins had been an unfamiliar landscape. Mothers had clustered their children indoors; businesses had had his tiny face plastered in their doors. There had not been a stretch of life unaffected by the mystery of his loss. It was inescapable, inundating, even in its wake.

The grade school kids across the street wheel their bikes home as Nancy pulls out. Around the bend, one of her own classmates walks his dog; she hauls the station wagon in the opposite direction. The week is warming, and the town is flocking to the sun, unaware that anything at all is wrong.

Folded in half. Missing one handlebar. Bottom of a ditch, just beside the highway. _Thought it might be hit-and-run_, the chief had said, tracking mud on Karen Wheeler’s flawless parquet, _but they don’t usually take the body_.

Two glasses of wine and a vodka soda later, Nancy had helped her mother up to bed, and felt the words repeating in her head, stammering like a scratched record. _The body. The body. The body_. It had haunted her into a sleepless night, over a cup of weak coffee, through a day of strained desperation.

She turns onto Wabash, the Big Buy in her rearview mirror, and starts south.

On this side of downtown, houses start to trickle to a crawl. Shutters peel and siding grows mildewed behind yards looped with chain link, and she thinks of a time not so far gone, of sweater sets and a nose turned up. A different girl riding down this street in a different car. If she closes her eyes, she can almost smell the Calvin Klein.

The station wagon is just rattling into a safe fifty when Nancy’s eyes land on a pair of orange braids against winter pines. She huffs out a sigh and eases on the brakes, lowering the window with a nail-scratch squeak.

“What are you doing?”

Max Mayfield’s eye roll is visible from six feet away, as is the frosty red of her nose. “Going _home_.” The words puff stark white into the air.

_Click_. “Door’s unlocked. Get in.” Nancy removes a flashlight and her mom’s old Polaroid from the passenger seat, but she only gets a freckled sneer for her efforts. Sometimes, she thinks Max and Mike could be the same person.

“It’s, like, half a mile.”

“Uphill, on ice_._” She doesn’t want to say it. She doesn’t want to put it into words: _My brother’s missing, and maybe dead, and you need to be careful_.

If Max hears them anyway, she doesn’t say it. A truck pulls around them noisily, and she chews crossly on a chapped lip. “What are _you_ doing out here, anyway?”

_Out here_. The meaning isn’t missed; it could nearly be a name on a map, circled and capitalized. Out Here, gravel and tin cans, where no one lives on purpose.

“Just going to look at something,” she answers, and it isn’t a lie. It passes whatever medieval bullshit code Mike and his posse were always touting until it was inconvenient.

“Can I come?” The question is hardly a question, more of a warning; Max is already reaching for the handle, an eagerness in her movements that contradicts the scowl in her eyes. Behind her, a pit bull clatters its fence, barking a rote pattern.

Nancy’s face pinches with impatience. Just the two days since she last saw Mike have permanently imbued her with wrinkles. “Your mom’ll throw a _fit_.”

But the door swings open, letting in crisp air, and Max bows her head beneath the roof. She’s grown taller too, taller than Nancy; her too-short corduroys disclose a healthy inch of striped sock as she climbs inside, backpack and skateboard a tight fit.

“My mom’s at work ‘til midnight,” Max protests. “Come _on_.”

_Jesus Christ_. “Fine. Okay.”

If Nancy had expected anything like agitating excitement on the girl’s face, she would be sorely befuddled by the reality. Instead, Max seems to deflate as she closes the door behind her, a neat _thwump_ that silences the dog’s baying. It’s relief, instead of triumph.

“You okay?” Nancy throws the car back into drive, watching Max from the corner of her eye. The tires crunch gravel as she pulls back onto the highway.

“Neil left.”

The second surprise hits harder than the first, leaving Nancy’s mouth dry and wordless. Grey clouds open up before them, but she feels almost claustrophobic, like the town has followed them and boxed them in. Like Hawkins isn’t a place at all, but a monster in itself, creeping south like smoke in the sky.

“I…” She swallows, shakes her head. Her fingers are stiff on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry.”

Max snorts, too loud in the silence. “Don’t be. I’m _glad_. It’s just…” Her eyes are glued to the window, fixed on the little, green sign as they come up on her street. It passes into the rearview mirror, and then vanishes. “My mom had to double her hours, you know? The house is always empty.” 

Nancy does know, and she doesn’t. Her house had always been full, always been teeming with a boisterous little brother, stomping down the stairs and rifling through the pantry and shouting from across her locked door. It had always been a circus, until suddenly it wasn’t. Mike got strange and quiet, and her parents stopped talking to each other, and suddenly she was living in a museum. Hushed voices, pretentious statuettes. All they were missing were marble floors.

“Could you go home with Lucas?” She isn’t sure why she asks it; she and Max certainly don’t have any sort of friendship, outside of facing down a few monsters.

“Every day?” Another face reminiscent of Mike, scrunched and incredulous. “I’d lose my _mind_.”

Nancy certainly doesn’t want to speak ill of the mourning, but she can’t help a tense smile, just a quick quirk of her mouth. Her brother’s friends are all family by now, and it comes with the requisite sibling vexation. Sometimes, she forgets where one of them ends and the other begins – was it Mike who spilled Kool-Aid on her backpack, or Dustin? Did she teach Lucas how to tie his shoes, or was that Will? 

The car rumbles past the last copse of beaten-down houses and the turn-offs for Delphi and Lewisburg, until the grey sky splits with the dinge of dead grass, and the countryside empties. For what seems like an age of silence, Nancy steels her jaw and watches the snow-dusted crops blur past, one after the other.

This all would have been dark, Wednesday morning. Just icy wind, a half-moon behind cloud cover, and a jacketless boy on a bike.

“How much further?” Max fiddles with the heater, restless energy sparking off of her. One of her braids is coming undone, and Nancy resists an urge to reach over and fix it.

“I don’t know. Close.” Another cornfield, brown and white. She should have brought a map. “I’m looking for a bridge, it should be-”  
It happens quicker than a heartbeat. For just a flash the thing is in the road, a sweep of pitch black from right to left, and Nancy punches the brakes so hard her stomach leaps. She hears Max yelp, feels the pain of whiplash already tensing through her neck, but it’s hardly an afterthought, because there’s a giant, black _thing_ on the road, feet from the nose of her station wagon. Ten feet tall, darker than tar, staring right through her with headlight-white eyes.

And then, in the next instant, there isn’t.

“Holy _shit_!” Max tears her seatbelt off, pressing a hand where it’s bruised her collar. Beneath the sea of freckles, her face is stark white. “What the _fuck_ was that?”

Nancy blinks, and then blinks again. She can’t tell if her body’s shaken itself into abject numbness, or if the jolt threw her mind a million miles away from it, but her own voice sounds like a long-distance call when she asks, “Are you okay?” A communication bouncing down from space. A ping from a lost satellite.

_I thought all this was over. I hoped all this was over_.

“Yeah.” It’s unsteady, uncertain. “Yeah, I think-”

There’s a sudden thump on the passenger window, and Nancy’s heartbeat skyrockets. She grabs wildly for the gear shift, one nail breaking on the vinyl as she tries to throw it into drive, but then-

“You ladies alright?”

Not the roar of a gruesome monster, but the nasal, Hoosier drawl of a pink-faced policeman, tapping on the station wagon window. Barry Brighton, hardly older than herself, in police browns. He looks like a child dressed for Halloween.

It’s Max who gets to the button first, rolling the window to half-mast. The smell of wood smoke drifts in. “Deer,” she says, cool as the air. “Out of nowhere.”

Barry sniffs and wipes his nose on one khaki sleeve, looking off into the cornfield. “Must’ve run off that way.” He gestures across the road, and then points his knobby chin over one shoulder. “We’ve got all this blocked off.”

And for the first time, Nancy sees it. Just a hundred yards ahead, cordoned with orange cones. The chief had said _bridge_, and she’d pictured something with rusted beams, spanning a great gulf of marsh. Something sinister, where things go to be lost. A nowhere land for monsters.

It isn’t any of that. It’s low and innocuous, just old asphalt and knee-high cement barriers over a modest creek. Behind it, the outline of a barn against the first minutes of sunset.

“Is this where they found it?” She can feel her eyes zero in on the creek, tunneling at the edges, as though tearing them away would be physically painful. “Mike Wheeler’s bike?”

The recognition is clear, as Barry’s face goes from surprised to understanding to apologetic, all in a slow, sequential shift. “Yes ma’am. I mean, Nancy. I mean, Miss Wheel-”

“Can I look around?” Her hand is already on the seatbelt, but she’s met by a headshake so agitated that the boy’s hat nearly flounders its way off.

“Sorry, I can’t let you in.” Barry holds up his scrawny wrist and looks for a watch that isn’t there. “This is an active site for, uh… another few hours.”

Max furrows her brow. “You’re _stopping_?” She turns to peer ahead, out the windshield, as though she could inspect the scene from here. All that’s visible is the top of a second officer’s head, lighting up a cigarette in the thistles.

“Closin’ up shop,” Barry confirms, dipping his chin. “I reckon we found all there is to find. No footprints, no nothin.’”

It’s a punch to the gut, and Nancy wants to scream. Her mind flips through scenarios like flashcards, and she can feel Max’s eyes on her, wide and discerning, looking to pinpoint Nancy’s worry.

_They don’t usually take the body_. Drunk drivers, no. But the shape of the _thing _is still seared behind her eyes, and she can’t stop thinking-

“What if the snow covered them?” she asks, and immediately she knows it was the wrong question. The wrong card. She’s missing basic facts, now.

“Ma’am, there ain’t been a flake of snow since Tuesday night.” It isn’t news he wants to tell her, and his pity is nauseating. Everything in Nancy itches to rush out of the car anyway, kick over the stupid cones, examine every blade of grass until one of them tells her the answer. “None of the ground’s been disturbed. Either no one walked out of this creek, or no one was in it in the first place.”

There would be blood, if there was a monster attack. Blood, or some kind of _clue_, maybe a footprint. A claw mark in the frozen soil. A broken branch. Nancy can find them.

“So you think the bike was planted?” Max this time, gears turning. She’s the practical half right now, Nancy thinks. The Jonathan of the situation.

Barry shrugs, a disheartening gesture from one of Hawkins’ finest. “Can’t say it wasn’t. But what I _can_ say is…” A brief pause, and a guarded look back at the ditch; his partner is still fumbling with his lighter, knee-deep in weeds. “What I _can_ say is that we’re looking into a suspect.”

* * *

**Side B. **

It’s cold. It’s _very_ cold, or maybe it’s actually _hot_, or maybe it’s _both_. The wind stings, but at least it’s stopped snowing; the last flakes hang on his lashes, glinting like holiday lights. Overhead, the sky is patchy. Dark blue, light grey, pink coming in from the east. _Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. _Mike swerves across the center line and back, across and back, across and-

Headlights. A car horn. He swerves and steadies, back to his lane, panic bubbling up into laughter, into a stupid grin he flashes at the driver.

_Mike_.

The voice echoes, and he pulls back from it, grasping the early morning road, the wind whistling past his ears. He’s almost there. He can almost _see_.

_Mike_.

The barn’s dark roofline, the frozen stream, the concrete barriers. This is it. He can _feel_ what comes next: the pain in his head, the taste of creek water. A jolt sideways, tumbling end over end with his bike. He needs to _look_. He needs to _know_.

“Mike. Breakfast.”

A pair of warm eyes, brown and familiar. Behind them, cream-colored walls, the orange glow of a lamp through its cracked shade. Mike blinks, heavy eyelids fighting their way awake; the sofa arm has left a sharp crick in his neck.

“Hi,” El says, voice louder as the last of the dream fades away. She’s already dressed, and the living room smells like syrup.

Wincing, Mike pushes up on his elbows. “Hi,” he answers, managing a pallid smile. His watch reads “9:06” – just four hours after his and Will’s whispered conversations finally petered off into a light sleep. Four hours of restless dreams, dropping in and out of wild, hazy memory, and he barely feels like he closed his eyes at all.

They hadn’t talked about the bridge, or the stream. They hadn’t talked about a cliffside in 1983, or the years stretching out since, or the careening heartache of that moment on the front stairs. Instead, Will had looked up him, hands still flat on his back, and said, _I can’t believe you missed _Ghostbusters_. _

And Mike, lying through the ringing in his ears, had asked, _What’s _Ghostbusters_? _

“Alright, we have scrambled eggs, and we have the world’s _tiniest_ pancakes.” Joyce peers around the doorway, an egg-spattered spatula in one hand and a fleck of white shell on her cheek.

A call from behind her, gruff as ever: “Just eat two at a time!” Hopper. For the first time since waking, Mike notices the clamor filtering in from the rest of the house, and a hum of irritation prods at him. He wants to run, or hide, or shout. 

El seems to sense it, and she pulls back, rising to her feet. “Coffee?” Calm, helpful.

“Yeah.” He nods, scrubbing a hand over his face, but a creaking tread on the stairs stops him, and he looks up and over, breath stalling.

Wet hair, cheeks flushed from hot water. Will pauses, lips pressed together – then, he smiles.

“Hey.”  
“Hey,” Mike repeats, softer, as the distance closes. Something in his stomach mourns for those quiet, pre-dawn hours, and only when El and Joyce leave the room, disappearing back into the kitchen in search of coffee mugs, does it feel somewhat quelled. He sits all the way up, running fingers through his tangled hair.

“Hopper wants to talk to you again.” Will perches on the end of the sofa, too many feet away. “They’re all being sneaky about it.” 

They aren’t. They never were, starting from last night. After Will’s retreat, Mike had spent hours sitting on this same couch, feeling like a psychologist’s patient, squirming under a magnifying lens. He’s known the police weren’t done with him from the moment they left the station.

“It’s not like it’s gonna help,” he answers, and he knows it’s too bitter, too full of vitriol, but he can’t pacify it. He just wants to go _home_, and not to his mom’s new apartment in Louisville.

“…Yeah.” Will swallows, looking down at socked feet. His posture is almost rigid under an oversized T-shirt, and Mike can read him like a book, even after months apart.

He doesn’t believe the story. Nobody does.

“Will-” Mike moves to follow, reeling and lightheaded, but before he can say anything else-

_Ding. _

Five heads turn towards the front door – six, as Mike’s mom emerges from the back bathroom, a toothbrush frothing in her mouth. The bell rings again – _ding_ – and this time, is followed by a pounding against the wood.

“I’ll get it!” El springs forward from the kitchen, full of jubilant energy. Hopper follows, considerably less jubilant.

“Oh, for Christ’s _sake_.”

Anxiety swells in Mike’s stomach, pushing at floodgates. The knob squeaks, metal on metal, as Hopper reluctantly opens the door, letting in whatever villain has caught on to their situation; Dr. Brenner, maybe, or one of his goons from the lab. Something worse, something there to finish the job from the highway.

“Holy _shit!_ Holy _fucking shit_!”

Dustin Henderson stands frozen on the stoop, first still raised in position, eyes zeroed in past Hopper, to where Mike stands behind the coffee table in too-small pajamas. After only a moment, a second pair of hands wrestle Dustin to the side, frantic and determined.

“_Mike_?!” Lucas shoves for a spot, slack jawed. Both boys’ eyes are moon-wide, their expressions frozen. The magnifying glass strengthens, pinpoint sun gleaming in, and Mike shrinks a bit under the heat.

“What part of ‘confidential’ didn’t you understand?” It isn’t directed at either of the boys; instead, Hopper peers over their heads towards a third face on the front steps, freckled and innocent.

“It wasn’t _me_,” Max argues, stepping around both of her friends and into the warm house. Her eyes flick over at Mike, uncharacteristically apologetic. “It was Lisa Brighton. Her brother works for the police.” Barry, a spindly guy with perpetual braces, a couple years ahead of Nancy. Mike remembers seeing him at the station, fumbling with paperwork behind the front desk.

Hopper groans and moves back towards his mug of coffee, letting Lucas and Dustin pile in through the door. A struggle of snow-dusted parkas and long limbs ensues, before Lucas triumphs, entering the room with raw wonder in his eyes. Behind him, Dustin looks close to tears. Discomfort spins faster and faster in Mike’s stomach. He had wanted to see them, but not like _this_. Not like he’s some kind of phenomenon. Not like his friends’ hearts are breaking all over again.

“_Dude_,” Lucas breaths. His hair is buzzed closer than Mike remembers, but he can’t say if it’s new; he’s seen his remaining friends so infrequently since October. “You’re okay?”

“We missed you so _much_, man.” A plump tear vanishes down Dustin’s cheek as he steps forward, his smile half wonder and half hesitation. “Where have you-”

“Hey, hey.” Joyce sets down her spatula and scurries into the den, a force of order and control. “He already got the third degree from Hop. No questions right now.”

Mike shoots her a grateful glance, trying to keep the dread off his face. Everything in his head is _racing, racing, racing_, but he feels frozen, incapable of speech. The boundless, agitated high of the last few days has crashed, and all he wants to do is escape.

A quick meeting of shifting eyes is all it takes. El looks, heartbreakingly kind, like she’s trying to quell the dark thing in his chest, like she can still feel what he’s thinking. Then, she looks over at their unexpected company, and grins.

“We’re having tiny pancakes,” she announces. “Coffee?” 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope you all had a nice and safe summer! ✌︎ Permanent and ongoing apologies about how long it takes me to get chapters out because of... /gestures at the study montage in legally blonde. I definitely thought I'd be done with this story eleven months after posting the first chapter, but instead I'm still in the first act, and I'm so thankful for those of you who are still reading ❤︎
> 
> xx ghost

**Side B.**

“Mrs. McDonald isn’t the _best _teacher. She’s just the _blondest_.”

A pancake-laden fork punctuates the point, dripping syrup onto Max’s placemat. Her claim is met with a clamor of disapproval, adding to the comfortable hum of the breakfast table.

“Blonde people can’t be good teachers, now?” Dustin sneers, eyes scrunching up into half-moons, but it’s good-natured. He presses a friendly elbow against Mike, who’s watching the whole scene with something between amusement and overload.

Lucas makes an obstinate grab for the saltshaker. “You just like Mr. Brown ‘cause of his _beard_.”

“Only one I’ll ever see,” Max retorts, to a smatter of appreciative _oohs_.

The Byers’ dining room table seats eight – three teenagers, two parents, and a carousel of rotating guests, in seats topped by faded needlepoint. Mismatched chairs wedge between claustrophobic arms, a satellite band of voices that just add to the tension in Mike’s shoulders. He looks up from his plate and makes eye contact with his mom from across the swath of serving plates; she smiles, easy and kind. It makes him want to cry, somehow.

“Are you two back together?” Nancy asks; the Wheeler women are the only ones touching the provided knives, slicing their pancakes into tidy strips.

“Since last week,” Dustin answers around a full mouth. “Their record’s two months.” Then, with a turn towards Mike, “Can you be_lieve_ he was the first one to get a girlfriend?” It earns him a swat from Lucas.

Mike opens his mouth, protest ready – then, just as quietly, he shuts it.

It didn’t happen like that here. He never kissed El in a school gym, hands around the waist of a satin dress. He never sat next to her on a lumpy couch, _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ half-muted on the television, and asked if he could be her boyfriend someday. She never said yes.

Max blessedly breaks the silence: “_I_ can’t.” Another round of laughter, light and carefree. It cuts right through Mike’s stomach like nausea, and he struggles to swallow his bite of pancake, suddenly dry and thick in his throat. The gentle commotion prickles in his chest – too loud, too harsh, every sound a shock of electricity.

He shoves his chair back, hands planted on the edge of the table, wincing at the monstrous scrape against the wooden floors.

“I’m-” They’re all looking at him, and he wants to disappear. He wants to run out the back door and keep running until he finds air that his lungs will accept. “I’ll be right back.”

The bathroom is muggy, the mirror steamed with floral heat from a recent shower. Mike flicks on the lights and sinks to the floor the second the lock clicks, his back pressed against the wall. It’s a pose he recognizes, arms wrapped in a vice grip around his knobby knees, and for a wild second all he can think of is Halloween, more than a year ago. Will, sucking in desperate breaths, shaking in a tan jumpsuit. Is this what it feels like? Is the air about to go thick and green, dense with spores?

He squeezes his eyes shut, and tugs at his tangled hair, trying to feel something other than the crushing pressure in his chest. His thoughts are a spinning loop, vicious and confusing: warm laughter at the table, his mom’s warm eyes, Dustin’s teasing grin. Everyone he loves, wrapped around him in one orbit, doting and caring in a way that feels so alien from the cold heartbreak of home.

Everyone he loves, and everyone he’s lying to. Everyone he’s going to hurt if the truth comes out, if they find out that their wayward, prodigal boy really is lost to them, really did kill himself in an act of needless heroism.

Mike rubs his hands over his face, and opens his eyes.

And the world turns sideways.

For a moment, it’s simple. His eyes open to pure black, all-encompassing darkness, and he thinks: the power is out. This is an old house, with old wiring, and Hawkins’ power lines have just been hit with a few good inches of snow and ice. The possible answers are plentiful, and logic overtakes panic long enough to suck in a good breath and push his self-pity aside. Mike pushes off of the floor, using the toilet’s edge for support, and reaches resolutely for the doorknob.

The first thing he notices is the silence. Even from the bathroom floor, he had been able to hear the breakfast chatter, like white noise from a radio. Now, the only sound is the persistent ticking of a clock, somewhere in the dark kitchen. He takes a careful step forward, and then another, like the creak of a floorboard might attract danger.

Fear doesn’t start to creep in until he reaches the threshold, and the doorway to the dining room becomes visible.

Dark. Empty. No sign of the Byers’, or his mom, or his friends. No heaping plates of breakfast food, no scent of syrup and eggs. The only thing in the room is a small, round table, draped in lace, enclosed by three chairs.

Mike takes a step backwards, towards the bathroom door. Maybe the answer is there, cowering behind the closed door. Maybe he can reverse the process, undo whatever it is that’s happened. He turns around, heart pounding – and freezes.

There’s a woman in the doorway to the back bedroom.

She looks as old as his grandmother, her hair scant and wiry, her frail fingers clutching the hand rims of her wheelchair. He thinks for a moment that she might scream and prepares himself to lie for his life. _Sorry, wrong house._

What Mike isn’t prepared for is the woman reaching behind the doorframe, just out of view, and returning with a shotgun.

“I’m leaving, I’m going!” He stumbles backwards, the twin muzzles glaring like a second set of furious eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”

The woman replies with a shake of the gun, and a stream of Spanish that Mike can’t understand. He doesn’t bother with further apologies, instead raising his hands in a pose of deference and hauling to the back door as quickly as possible.

_That’s it, I’m crazy_, he thinks, rushing out onto the back porch._ I hallucinated the whole thing. _Maybe he hit his head in the crash and has just been in this lady’s house the whole time. Maybe he’s still there in the ditch, bleeding out into the brown grass.

The snow crunches under his bare feet, and the resulting swear comes out in a puff of white. It’s not as cold as it was yesterday, but it’s still _goddamn cold_, and he’s not too addled to recognize the badness of this situation. The woman inside has probably already called the police, and Mike needs to find somewhere to hide that won’t give him frostbite. Losing his mind might be inevitable, but he’d rather not lose toes on top of that.

He’s halfway to the edge of the yard, looking out at the blank, white field, when the back door opens behind him. His chest clenches up, expecting a husband or a son, shotgun blazing.

It’s Nancy.

“Mike?” The concern in her voice is indisputable. She looks like she’s watching her own heart break. “Where the hell are you going?”

* * *

**Side A.**

“A _dog_?”

Dustin asks it around a mouthful of crinkle fries; a dab of ketchup sits, unnoticed, at the corner of his frown.

“But _huge_,” Max confirms. She’s busy working her hair into a braid, two slices of cardboard-crusted pizza already systematically devoured from a plastic tray. Lucas listens, visualizes, mulls over the words.

“And it was right there, where-” he starts, but his girlfriend cuts him off.

“Right where they found the bike.” She had told them she had news, in the flurry of a mid-class locker stop, but Lucas hadn’t expected _this_. “Maybe it’s connected, right?”

It comes as a vague surprise when Dustin, usually first to get caught up in the intrigue and excitement of a cryptozoological mystery, doesn’t reply. He just takes a sip of his milk, the end dregs bubbling at the base of the straw, and frowns at their neighboring table. The stares the trio have been receiving all day haven’t gone unnoticed. Somewhere between pity and interest, their classmates have been peering around ponytails and locker doors since yesterday morning, when the news first broke. Any invisibility that their social status had previously cursed them with has disappeared; for the second time in as many years, they’re The Missing Boy’s Friends. Talks of a grave, supernatural curse have already started up.

“Told you guys we should have eaten in the band room,” Dustin mutters. Lucas ignores the flare of annoyance that flashes through his chest, and turns towards Max.

“So,” he continues, “If some monster’s got him-”

“Woah, I didn’t say it was a _monster_.” A forehead full of freckles scrunches up in obvious disdain. “I said it was _some_thing. Besides, they said they had a-”

“A dog the size of a van sounds kind of like a monster to me!”

Max tips her head back, irritated. “Maybe it was a _bear_, I don’t _know_.”

“Since when does a bear sprint?” Dustin finally adds, though his heart isn’t into it. That seems to be the tipping point; Max crosses her arms over her chest and starts to scoot her chair back, summoning up a closing retort.

“I said _maybe_,” she snaps, an exasperated sigh almost audible in the short words. Sensing the opening notes of an ongoing feud, Lucas lets out a frustrated breath and concedes.

“Okay, we’ll put it on the list, and we’ll keep looking.” He makes a mental addition, in Max’s penciled chicken scratch: _Dog-bear-monster_. “And what else? What were you saying they had?”

“A suspect. They said they had a _suspect_.”

There’s a harsh _squeak_, like nails on a chalkboard, as Dustin abruptly pushes his chair out. He picks up his carton, crushing it a bit in his hand. “I’m gonna get more milk.” His voice is good-natured, but clearly stilted.

They both watch him for a moment, bickering halted in favor of tense concern. Lucas is about to turn back to his tray when Max touches his arm, nudging his attention back across the room. Dustin’s bypassed the milk cooler entirely, and his mess of curly hair is disappearing through the cafeteria door.

“Shit,” Lucas says. He stands up, snagging the attention of at least a dozen nosy classmates. “Look, I’ll see you later, okay?”

Max nods, eyes gentle. “Go get him, stalker.”

The boys’ restroom is small and dim, half in shadow from a burned-out light. Dustin stands against the glossy, cream-colored cinderblocks, a paper towel held to his pinched eyes. Even from the doorway, Lucas can recognize the wet rattle of tears.

“What’s up?” It comes out too loud. When Dustin just shakes his head, Lucas adds, “It’s okay, man. You can tell me anything.” He can’t pretend that he hasn’t felt the distance this last year – the distance between _all_ of them – but he can choose to fix it. This is him, fixing. Calling the shots, in Mike’s absence.

Without moving the paper towel, Dustin finally mumbles, “What if it’s not monsters?”

“What-”

“I mean, what if it has _nothing_ to do with the Upside Down, this time?” Finally, Dustin uncovers miserable, red-rimmed eyes. There’s an exhaustion in his words that makes Lucas feel like shit. _He’s taking it really hard_, Max had said, the night before last. They shouldn’t have let it drop. They should have done _more_, but-

“Come on,” he tries, half-assing a smile. “Mike wouldn’t just _leave_. He’d tell us first.”

Blinking hard, Dustin shakes his head. “He left be_fore_, in fifth grade!” A hazy memory, their moms all fretting over something that passed, an almost-disaster over in an afternoon. None of them talked about it, just like they didn’t talk about how easily Mike fell into his moods, or how sometimes there was no getting through to him at all.

He swallows, stomach churning. “Yeah, but-”

“And then there was the _cliff_.” The way Dustin says it, it may as well be capitalized. Something vitally, gravely important. Lucas searches his memory, then frowns.

“When El caught him?” Troy, a knife, the old quarry. An oft-repeated victory cycled into legend.

But Dustin doesn’t answer. There’s a twitch, and a sniff, and suddenly his face is twisting back up into anguish. A fresh set of tears start to track down his round cheeks as he yelps out, “He just _jumped_! He didn’t even look scared!”

Lucas steps closer, brow furrowed. He knows the story by heart, but the point doesn’t land. What does that awful, insane day have to do with _this_? “He was trying to save you,” he says, confused, but it already feels empty, like he’s piling more glue onto something that’s already falling apart.

“My _teeth_!” Dustin insists, voice edging on hysteria. “Who would die for _teeth_?”

_A hero_, Lucas would have said two years ago. He’d sure thought so the first time Dustin told the story, grubby hands gesticulating under hospital lights. Mike, brave and selfless, saving Dustin from a bully. Mike, twelve years old, accepting death without a tremble. They’d all been too wired to notice the cracks in their thesis. Even Dustin, who would have gladly traded his teeth to see Mike safe, was caught up in the sleepless relief of _winning_.

Lucas’ stomach goes cold.

“Someone who loves his friends,” he finally says, quiet and neutral. _What would Mike say? What would Mike do right now?_ “Someone who’d do _anything_ to help them.”

He may as well have recited nursery rhymes; Dustin just looks down at the grody tiles, and wipes his nose on the rough, brown paper. “We should have told somebody. We should have told an adult.” _An adult_. Like they’re little kids, too small in a world controlled by their parents.

“There was a lot going on, man.” And who could they have _told_? Who would have helped? “And there’s no telling why he did that. He’s always been-”

“Stupid.” For the first time, Dustin looks up, bleary eyes meeting Lucas’. One of the remaining lights flickers. “What do you think happened? This time?”

Commotion spills in from outside; lunch is nearly over, and with it their privacy. Lucas edges in front of the doorway, like he could somehow protect Dustin from any intrusion. “I don’t know,” he answers, achingly honest. “Maybe we should do what we did before. Take the Mike Wheeler approach.”

Finally, _blessedly_, Dustin smiles. It’s half-hearted, but it’s something. “Walk around in the woods like dumbasses?”

“At night.”

“In a fucking _thunderstorm_.”

Their wet laughter is drowned out by the door swinging in, and Dustin darts to throw away his towel, face bowed and hidden. The two push against the post-lunch influx and out into the hall, under the shriek of the overhead bell.

“We’re gonna do it, okay?” Amid the jostle of backpacks and binders, Lucas looks down, resting a hand on Dustin’s shoulder, and tries to believe himself. For just a moment, Mike’s voice overlays his own in his mind, and he _does_. “We’re gonna find out why he left, and where he went, and we’ll- we’ll get him back, man. I _swear_.”

* * *

**Side B.**

Jonathan’s room lacks the cold, grey professionalism of the station’s interrogation table, but it works in a pinch. The trio shuffles in – Mike, his mom, the Chief – under an audience of posters, alt-rock legends looking on in judgment as the guilty party sits down on the plaid blanket, twisting his hands. His feet still prickle with phantom snow.

“You’re still sticking with your story from yesterday?” Hopper leans against the wall, a broad-shouldered barrier between the bed and the door. The look on his face isn’t one Mike is used to, and it makes his stomach turn. It’s quieter, almost careful. A wary adult dealing with a child they don’t understand.

“I don’t know,” Mike answers, stubborn but truthful. His mom sits down beside him, plain concern in her eyes. She’s still not wearing any makeup, and her hair is knotted into one of Nancy’s scrunchies.

There’s a clamor in the kitchen, dishes and voices and the trill of a phone. Hopper moves closer, like a microscope lens focusing in on a subject. “You don’t know _what_?”

“I don’t know what happened.” Frustration, coughed out into sharp words. It’s the plainest lie he’s told, and Mike can feel its rejection immediately, in the way his mom brings a hand to her temple, the way Hopper shuffles his notepad. The air is muggy with discomfort.

“Look, Mike.” Hopper runs a hand over his eyes. He doesn’t look like he’s had much sleep, if any. “This isn’t an interrogation. You’re not a _suspect_. You can just… take it easy.”

A bubble of laughter, sharp and hysterical, stops itself in Mike’s throat. _Easy_? Really? He’s halfway convinced that he’s just hallucinated someone’s grandmother pointing a gun at him in the kitchen, and he’s supposed to take it easy?

“Now, there’s a guy named Dr. Owens,” Hopper continues, kneeling down with a pop of his joints. “He used to see Will, after what happened in ’83, and I think it’s a good idea if he checks you over.”

The air in Mike’s lungs goes to ice. “For what?” He knows about Dr. Owens. He _knows_ Dr. Owens, just like he knows what someone’s death throes sound like after they’ve been mauled to shreds.

“Anything that might explain where you’ve been. He knows about the Upside Down.”

“He hasn’t _been_ to the Upside Down,” Mike’s mom cuts in, sitting up straighter, and if it weren’t for the rush of panic flooding Mike’s chest, he might realize why the words sound wrong in her voice. He might make sense of it faster. Instead, he just shakes his head blindly, eyes fixed on the floor. In the wood’s knots and fibers, he can almost make out the front doors of the lab, gaping open, spewing out horrible noises. The ice has moved to his stomach, wrapped a fist around his entire abdomen. Wildly, he wishes that his mom would hug him.

“I haven’t.” Not since the tunnels, but then… did that even happen here, without him to suggest it? How did they save Will and El that night? It’s not like he can _ask_ without giving himself away. Shit, he’s going to have to be careful, and that’s hard to do when your mind feels like a jalopy shaking apart. “I haven’t even seen it.”

But something in Hopper’s eyes is too knowing when he leans in, and for the first time Mike can almost imagine how El loved him. There’s no anger in his face, none of the spitting disdain he showed for his daughter’s no-good rascal of a boyfriend. He looks like a father, and not for the first time Mike thinks back to that awful night at the Byers’ house, to hoarse shouting that faded and broke and shook until strong arms looped around his back and held him together.

“I’m not here to be the bad cop,” Hopper says. “I’m here because I want to help. I want you to feel _safe_.”

Mike shakes his head, blinking frantically. “I _do_ feel safe.” And it’s hardly a lie, because he’s not sure _what_ he feels. Nothing makes sense, in or out of his head. He’s unmoored, unrooted, lost in space. His mom slides a hand over his elbow, and somewhere a phone rings again. He hears it through cotton. Outside of the door, the Byers household is still bustling, and Mike feels like the kid who got sick at the sleepover, ushered away from awkward, pitying eyes.

The look Hopper gives him isn’t pity, and it isn’t suspicion, but it’s spread somewhere between. “And that’s why you ran barefoot into the snow this morning?” Blunt, almost challenging.

“I wasn’t- I-” Two sets of eyes on Mike, and he wants to bolt. But where would he go? Back out to his friends? Will they even want to see him? “I freaked out. It was nothing.”

A short knock on the door saves him from the next question; when Joyce slips her head in Mike feels his body deflate with relief, a safe warmth no one else has yet provided.

“Hop? Flo’s on the phone.” Something about her exasperation makes it clear that this wasn’t the first call, and Hopper seems to pick up on it. With a gruff sigh he stands up and makes for the bedroom door, casting a final look back at Mike.

“You good, kid? Five minutes?”

Mike nods and tucks his restless hands under his thighs. The door swings halfway closed behind Hopper and Joyce. Mike feels the bed shift next to him, hears his mother say something about a cup of hot chocolate, and then, with another stream of fluorescence across the bedroom floor, he’s alone. He flops back on the bed, sucks in a grounding breath, and closes his eyes.

Joyce’s voice, filtering in from the kitchen, opens them.

“Linda Ballard, down towards Anoka.” It’s hushed, clearly meant to be kept private. “Just

found two of her horses dead.”

A huff of breath from Hopper. “I’m not goddamn Fish and Wildlife.”

“Hop, they were-” _They were what? _“You should really talk to Flo.”

Holding himself still as death, Mike pushes off of the mattress, willing it not to creak. Something is spinning to life in the back of his mind, an old windmill beginning to turn after months of dormancy, tugging at the hair on the back of his neck.

_It’s starting. It’s starting again_.

H’s just made it to the door, the kitchen a thin strip of light beyond the hall, when he hears his mother’s voice, timid and horrified in a way he’s never known: “They’re back, aren’t they? The monsters?”

* * *

** Side A. **

“He wouldn’t say what they think happened?”

Will shoves aside Jonathan’s comforter, making himself small in the far corner of the couch. The narrow front stretch of the Greenwood house is a revolving stage of spaces: his brother’s bedroom, a basecamp for fretting over Mike, a backdrop for every fierce argument in their two months here. Right now, it’s a dining hall; two Byers’ and one Hopper balance plates of lasagna in their laps, as precarious as the conversation, while the evening news flashes blue on the TV screen.

“He probably shouldn’t have even told her that much,” Jonathan answers from the armchair. “Nance is gonna call when she knows more.” The anchorwoman switches into a discordant fast food jingle, and Jonathan reaches for the remote, bumping the volume down a couple of notches.

Next to Will, El is a knot of limbs and nerves. She squints at the television, eyeing cartoon hamburgers as though they might make sense of something, and then murmurs, “A bad man hurt him?” It’s halting and brief, a little uncertain. Her words never come out as smoothly around a vice grip of fear.

“We don’t know that,” Will is quick to answer. “All they have is the bike.” His mom passes by the kitchen doorway, tomato-splattered spatula in hand, and he lowers his voice. She hasn’t wanted them speculating, wandering down rabbit holes that only lead to panic and hopelessness, but Will can’t just _stop_. The more possibilities he considers, the closer he comes to landing on the right one. Or at least, that’s what he thinks Mr. Clarke would say.

Jonathan hums in half-agreement. “That’s all they’ve _said_ they have, yeah.”

El’s eyes, flickering blue in the light, go wide. “Would they _lie_?” She has one frame of reference for law enforcement, and he was laid to rest a hero to the last step. The uselessness of the team who took his place continues to baffle her, each time they speak with Nancy.

“Sometimes they keep secrets,” Jonathan tries to explain, setting down his fork. “That way, if someone says one of the secrets, they know he was involved.” He says it like he’s explaining the color of the sky to a child, and it rubs Will the wrong way. Jonathan’s a great brother, but he takes El at face value, like her trouble communicating indicates a trouble understanding.

“Okay, turn that off.” Their mom bustles into the living room, her own plate steaming in one hand, hair frizzing out of its ponytail. There’s a pinprick stain of sauce on her work shirt. “No one’s called?”

“Not yet,” Jonathan answers, glancing at the clock.

Impatience and frustration bubble up in Will’s chest, and he barely feels himself adding, “Their parents don’t even _care_.” It comes out like poison, immediately turning on him.

“_Will_!” Joyce Byers rarely scolds, but her sharp, scandalized reaction comes close. It’s tinged with concern, though, recognizing the uncharacteristic prickliness in Will’s attitude. “How could you _say_ that?”

_Because I’ve been to their house_, he wants to say. _I’ve seen the way they talk to him_. But before he say anything else he’s sure to feel bad about later, there’s a series of rapid-fire knocks on the front door. Jonathan peers out the window, eyes widening at what he sees, and rushes to unlock the bolt.

“Nancy!” Jonathan ushers her into the house. “I thought you were-”

“I had to get out of there.” Her cheeks are pale, but her nose is red from the cold. Behind her, Will can see the Wheelers’ station wagon parked on the street.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Joyce sets down her plate and rushes over to wrap her arms around the girl. “Stay here as long as you like.” From dining hall, back to basecamp. Will knows he’ll be sleeping on the living room floor tonight.

“Did you find out anything?” he asks. Next to him, El sits up straighter, already waiting on needles for a reply.

For a moment, Nancy looks hesitant, eyes flicking between Jonathan and Joyce. When it was the Upside Down, information was passed readily, without regard for age or maturity. Will knows they think it’s different now, but the discrepancy makes him want to scream. They don’t _know_ it’s not the Mind Flayer. And even if they’re right, and it isn’t, how does that make it any less of the kids’ business? Mike is _always_ Will’s business.

“They think he just _left_ it,” Nancy finally says, her voice brimming with fury, hoarse with exhaustion.

Jonathan screws up his brow, incredulous. “_What?_”

“They think he just left it in the road.” Her footfalls heavy with annoyance, Nancy moves to sit on chair arm. Exhausted as she looks, her voice is tense and wired with fierce energy. “It’s all- it’s _bull_shit. They said since there's no evidence of an injury, it means nothing happened to him at _all_! They just want to fit it all into their stupid runaway theory.”

“They just _told_ you all that?” Jonathan asks, clearly surprised at the police’s generosity. But Nancy only shakes her head, the vaguest spark of mischief in her tired eyes.

“I went through their files while they were dealing with my mom.”

Will has always thought she was cool, but usually it’s been because she’s wielding a shotgun.

“How’s she doing?” his mom asks, looking back as she heads towards the kitchen. Despite her gentle tone however, it seems to ignite something else in Nancy. This is a girl who’s clearly been simmering all day, and she’s finally getting the chance to let loose.

“I can’t even _talk_ to her about it!” She stands up and starts to kick off her shoes. “She believes whatever the police say. She’ll believe _any_one’s theories as long as she doesn’t have to feel like it’s her fault. And my _dad-_”

But Will’s catharsis is cut short. Even in the face of such an outburst, he watches his mom’s eyes fill with kindness. “Go easy on them, honey,” she says from the doorway. “They’re going through one of the worst things a parent can face.”

Everyone in the room knows precisely what she’s talking about, and it sends a shiver of discomfort through Will’s stomach. He looks down at his plate and pinches his eyes closed. As much as his mom tries to relate though, he knows in his gut that she’s off-base. She did everything in her power to bring him home, while Mike’s mom would rather listen to the police and feel sorry for herself. If she was worth half of Will’s mom, she’d be out combing the woods day and night. She’d be working herself bone-tired to bring her son home.

Unexpectedly, El is the one to break the uncomfortable silence that follows, when she leans forward and asks, “You saw a monster?” Max had called them just a couple of hours ago, after the longest school day in recorded history, talking a mile a second about Nancy and a cop and a _giant dog_. Blessedly, Nancy doesn’t hesitate in answering.

“Yeah.” She rubs a fist across her eyes. “Me and Max.” There’s a level of conviction missing from her voice. Back in July, she was a spearhead. Now, she seems unsure of her own beliefs.

“Did you tell the police?” Will asks, though he already knows the answer.

“I would’ve been laughed out of the station. They’re basically zero help without Hopper.”

El shoves her lasagna around with her fork, tipping her head in a failed attempt to hide dampening eyes. It’s a step forward from summer, but grief is a long-lived beast. “He didn’t like Mike,” she manages, and it’s as fond as it is wounded.

Will’s mom returns with a plate for Nancy, just in time to hear the quiet remark. Her brows furrow up. “He _cared_ about Mike, sweetie. He was just protective of you. That’s how parents are.” She passes the plate off and stops to run a hand through El’s hair, longer and curlier by the month. “Now eat up. Food’s gonna get cold.”

Blinking away the traitorous beginning of a tear, Will shovels in a bite of lasagna. He tastes nothing. His thoughts keep bouncing, a game of ping pong between a shadowy beast and an empty road and a bike twisted around itself. For a wild, dizzy moment, he thinks back to Hopper’s fierce protection, and wonders if his mom will ever act that way over him, if someone will ever love him so much that she wants to wrap him up tight and keep him to herself. He’s not quite sure which part he can’t imagine.

Nancy sits down on the couch, creaking its springs, and reaches out to touch El’s shoulder. “We’ll get him home, okay? We’re not gonna give up.” Jonathan joins in, smiling warmly at Eleven, and then their mom offers something soothing, and in the pit of his stomach Will just wants to cry. He wants to fall apart. He wants to be _seen_, and held, and comforted, like the grieving girlfriend. Because everyone who knows them knows how _she_ hurts. Everyone can imagine what she’s going through, if not from life then from tragic movies or heart-wrenching news stories. It’s familiar. Girl loves boy, boy loves girl, one loses the other.

There’s no blockbuster movie for what Will feels. He has no right to more grief than their other friends. No one’s ever going to look at him and just _know_ that his entire world has been thrown out of its orbit. He can never tell anyone how, at fourteen, he feels like his life has already ended a third time over.

He can never tell anyone anything at all.

* * *

**Side B.**

December 13, 1985

The meager lot in front of Family Video is stark empty when Robin drives up in her mom’s sedan. A thin layer of ice sluices off of the window when she slams the door, the too-early hour palpable in her bones. Her trudge to the front door is a zombie shuffle, pausing only to pick the damp newspaper up from the front mat.

“Hey, Deborah?” The smell of popcorn and carpet cleaner greets her as she pushes through the door, fingers already unfolding the paper. Her target: movie showtimes. She’s dragging Steve to see _A Chorus Line_ if she has to beg. “Have you seen my bookbag? I think I left it last night.”

Her coworker shouts something indistinct from the back room, and Robin starts down the aisle. A poster of Chevy Chase makes a face at her, and she makes it right back.

Then she glances down at the paper in her hands, and her whole body freezes.

“Holy _shit_.”

The walk back to the front desk takes all of two seconds. She spreads the paper out, eyes scanning as quick as her fingers can punch out seven familiar digits on the shitty phone. There are several seconds of staticky tone, a couple of whispered curses, and-

“Hello?” Slurred, barely awake. Typical Harrington.

“Haul your ass out of bed, dipshit.” She’s practically vibrating in her sneakers. From the desk, a full-color photo of a seventh-grader’s toothy grin looks up at her. “They found Nancy’s brother.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT NOTE. After further plotting I've done some tiny edits to two earlier chapters, so if you read chapters 1-5 before 10/17/20: Russia is cancelled. That subplot just was not working. In Chapter Five, when Nancy arrives at the Byers' house to discuss what she learned from the police, she no longer tells them that the police suspect Russian involvement, but instead that Mike abandoned his bike of his own volition, and is thus officially considered a runaway. You might want to go back and skim the second Side A segment in Chapter Five. Part of the reasoning for this change is that when I started this story I wanted to contrast science fiction dangers and real life dangers, and Russia was throwing it off. 
> 
> Thanks for continuing to read even though it's taken me more than a year to get six chapters in lmao 
> 
> xx ghost

** Side B.  **

“Doing alright?”

The couch creaks, dipping minutely. Mike watches his mom sit, his sleep-rimmed eyes behind a paperback from Will’s room;  _ The Hobbit _ , soft and worn and conspicuously lacking a couple of familiar dwarves. He’s thought briefly about pocketing it, taking it back to his own world as proof for his friends, but it feels wrong. Stealing from Will would surely be a cardinal sin if any of them believed in that sort of thing.

“I’m fine,” he answers, a moment too late and a pinch too dull to be convincing. His fingers fiddle with a lovingly dog-eared corner.

“I bet you could recite those books from memory, by now.” His mom spreads a page of newsprint out in front of her, headed by a coffee-smudged  _ CLASSIFIEDS _ . One bare nail tracks through the job ads, down to the tiny, black-and-white photos of houses. Then, farther down, the rooms and apartments. Someone’s basement all the way out down in Walton. He looks back at his book, trying not to spy, but the close distance is stifling. Then, blessedly breaking the stretch of silence, “Roosevelt Drive… That’s over by the mall, right?”

For a perilous second, Mike nearly agrees. He catches his chin dipping into a nod, and only manages to hitch his shoulders up into a shrug at the last second. “I don’t-”

“Oh.” His mom at least has the grace to look uncomfortable by the blunder. “Mall’s new. Or it  _ was _ .”

Mike halfway expects this to be  _ it _ , the moment she comes out and tells him that she knows, that she’s always known. He isn’t hers, he isn’t the right one, he’s an  _ imposter _ . His stomach turns, and he gathers his knees close to his chest, pushing down anxiety that’s as familiar as oxygen, and then –

She keeps talking.

“It was over by the Dairy Queen.” A quick reach towards a side table, a perfect circle penciled around one listing. “They built it on top of those old baseball fields. Remember going out there with Nancy and your dad?”

He does. If he closes his eyes and thinks hard enough, he can still feel the scratchy grass at his ankles. He can see the orange sunset over the red trees, coloring the rusting backstop. He can feel his dad’s hands guiding his first pedals on a bicycle, years before he knew what it’s like to stand in front of him and feel utterly invisible. Years before he saw a gun pointed at him in the halls of his school and wondered if his parents would be sad at all.

“Mom?” It sounds like it’s coming over a radio. He doesn’t look up from his book.

“Hm?” Unsuspecting, but attentive. The paper goes down, flat across tucked legs.

_ Okay, breathe. You can do this. You can-  _ “How do you know about the Upside Down?”

To his mom’s credit, she doesn’t look surprised. She doesn’t close off or clam up. She just brushes a stray, undyed strand from her eyes, and levels a soft gaze at Mike. Meeting it feels like comfort, like a kind arm around his shoulder.

“Nancy told me,” she finally says, quieter than before.

Mike looks up. “ _ Nan _ cy?” It’s no more surprising than any other option, but he wouldn’t have put money on it. He was expecting Mrs. Byers, or maybe Dustin. As much trouble as he’s had getting along with their parents lately, most of it has been through his own silence. Nancy’s never given them that courtesy, arguing back loudly at every turn.

His mom nods, the edges of her face beginning to crinkle up. When she speaks, her voice is unsteady. “That night, after…”  _ After you disappeared,  _ Mike fills in.  _ After you jumped _ . “She thought, maybe-”

She thought Mike might be there, in the Upside Down. Trapped, the same way that Will had been. His stomach turns, guilt twisting and clawing, and he isn’t even sure why. It wasn’t  _ him _ who left them! It wasn’t his  _ fault _ ! Maybe the thought had crossed his mind, halfway through grim, sleepless nights, but it was always passing, always brushed off like a mosquito. A curiosity easily ignored. He’d never… He  _ wouldn’t _ -

But he  _ did _ .

All he can manage to say is, “Oh.”

His mom sniffs, damp and indiscreet. She folds the newspaper and slips it onto the side table. “I didn’t believe any of it, at first.”

Unsurprising. “What changed your mind?” Mike asks. He feels a million miles away from his body. In the back of his mind, he almost expects the room to  _ change _ again.

“Probably Dustin’s imitation of that  _ Demongorgon _ thing.” She smiles halfheartedly, breaking as if for canned laughter. Nonetheless, Mike feels a tug of fondness. “And I saw how scared your sister was, when she thought you were still in that place. I’d never seen her that scared of anything. We went over to Joyce’s, and she called a big meeting and let the kids act it all out for me.”

He can picture it perfectly: the Byers’ house as it was in 1983, a mess of Christmas lights and painted walls and overturned furniture. His mom in the middle of it, with her sprayed hair and her department store coat, sitting politely on the edge of a ruined sofa. But then, maybe that woman was already gone. Maybe she had already scraped off her makeup and her jewelry, traded her romance novels for newsprint and her satin pajamas for sweatshirts. Or maybe she was never like his old mom, here. Maybe she was always attentive, always watching Mike with implausible tenderness and wrapping an arm around Nancy’s shoulders.

Is it their fault for keeping secrets from her? Is that why she changed, back home?

Mike fiddles more with the book, fingers accidentally ripping the edge of one page. “We thought we’d get in trouble if someone found out.” It seems so  _ stupid _ , now. Everything about that first year feels small in hindsight, even the Demogorgon. That  _ thing _ they saw over the summer could have crushed it with one tendril. 

“It’s okay, sweetie.” His mom leans closer, the cushion crinkling under her palm. The corners of her eyes glint with tears, and Mike has to look away. “No one’s mad. I only ever wanted you  _ safe _ . That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“I know,” Mike replies, but he doesn’t know if he means it. Has he ever really known that? Is that his fault too, for pushing his parents away so long ago? They had shown up at the mall, his mom hovering, bewildered, and his dad questioning the paramedics like they had any answers, but by that point he had been gone from his own head, caught up in El’s grief, in his own grief. Despite their fiercest, ugliest arguments, Hopper had made him feel safer than his parents had ever managed, and the loss had gripped his stomach like a fist. 

“Whatever happened, these last two years…” His mom smells like coffee, like the Byers’ dish detergent, like a home Mike’s always known but never associated with her. “You can tell us. We’re all taking your lead, baby.”

The affection in her voice cuts right to Mike’s stomach. He drops the book, twisting his hands together in his lap. “I know,” he echoes again. “I just-”

A beat of silence. “You just what?”

_ I just don’t want to hurt you. I’m always hurting people _ . “It’s all mixed up in my head.” Not a lie. “I feel like I’m crazy.”

“We’re gonna figure it out,” his mom answers, and it feels better than it has any right to. He’s not entitled to take any comfort from this, not when he’s spouting lie after lie. “It’s gonna be fine, baby.” Then she opens her arms, and she smiles like Mike remembers from so very long ago, and he finally relents to the aching in his chest. He’s across the couch in seconds, burying his face in her too-limp hair, letting her pull him close like he’s a child awoken from a nightmare.

“I’m gonna go get Holly this weekend,” she continues, stroking a hand down Mike’s back. He feels himself shake, and faintly notices that he’s starting to cry, but it’s all through a fog. He’s watching himself from deep in his own head, as if on a movie screen. “I’ll look for a job, and we’ll get an apartment, and we’ll work everything out. It’ll be a little family again. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Mike breathes in, breathes out, and shudders into silent, earnest tears. His mom’s arms tighten around him.

“I love you.”

Mike opens his eyes.

“I love you _so_ _much_, sweetheart.”

“I-” He chokes, words freezing up in his throat. The panic in his eyes is hidden in soft cotton, but he knows his mom – (is she really  _ his _ ?) – can feel it, the way he suddenly tenses under her hands. And the thing is, he  _ wants _ to say it back. He wants that easy exchange, the one he’s witnessed time and time again in his friends’ families, a simple reminder at the front door or over the phone. He tries to remember the last time he heard it from either of his parents; with a shock of anguish, he comes up empty.

“I…” It wavers, and his mom finally starts to pull back, concern in her face, and everything that was  _ so good _ just moments ago suddenly feels awful, and it’s all Mike’s fault, and-

The front door swings open, letting in a blast of winter air.

“Is that today’s paper?” Nancy is a mess of wind-blown hair and determination, hardly taking in the scene before stomping over to their mother’s discarded classifieds. There’s a drug store bag in one hand and a rolled-up newspaper in the other, twine still tied.

Mike extracts himself and pulls back over to the sofa arm, watching as his mom checks the date.

“Sunday’s. Why?”

Nancy shrugs out of her coat and passes the new one over. Friday morning edition, December 13 th . For the first time, it occurs to Mike that his birthday isn’t far off. He’s idly wondering if he’ll make it home in time when the paper unrolls, and he stops thinking very much at all.

_ MISSING BOY FOUND ALIVE _ . The words stretch out over a picture of his face, childish and grinning in front of a middle school yearbook backdrop. The same one sits on his parents’ mantle back home, between matching shots of his sisters.

“How…” Their mom shakes her head, dazed, looking frozen between a million reactions.

“Same person who leaked it to Hawkins High, I’m guessing.” Nancy reaches into her plastic sack and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, slipping it into her pocket while she thinks no one’s looking; Mike does her the courtesy of pretending she’s right.

“Dammit.” Massaging her temple, their mom stands up and starts out of the room.

“At least they don’t know where we’re staying,” Nancy throws in, a hail Mary called over her shoulder, but it gets no response.

The sound of rustling paper comes from the kitchen, and Mike turns to see his mom hauling the phone book onto the counter, next to drying breakfast plates. “I’m calling Joyce,” she says, voice distracted and anxious, panic seeping in at the edges. More of a disconcerting pantomime Mike has never seen before. 

Sighing, Nancy leans onto the back of the couch and gives Mike’s shoulder a light, tentative pat, like she’s not sure she’s allowed. He tries not to tense in reaction. “Are you okay?” It’s uncomfortably pitying.

“Is Dad gonna see this?” Mike has been swallowing down that line of questioning for days now, unsure if he actually wants or needs to know the answer:  _ Will Dad find out I’m back? Will I have to see him? Will he care _ ? Whenever he tries, he can’t quite picture the reunion. A son who’d only been a burden, and a dad who’d given up on giving a shit. All he knows is that there will be no tearful hug, no “baby” or “sweetheart”, nothing that sends a soft, safe warmth through his chest for the first time in ages.

Nancy shrugs, her eyes sympathetic. “He’s up in Gary, with Uncle Rick.” An identically useless man with twin wire-frame glasses and antique political ideals.

“That’s a long way for Mom to bring him dinner,” Mike says, a weak attempt at a joke. Nancy laughs, though, and he knows they’re imagining the same scene: two men nearing fifty, sitting in matching La-Z-Boys and grunting sleepily at the television over TV dinners. Microwaved mashed potatoes and boring prattle about Reagan.

One-sided conversation filters from the kitchen: “leak” and “newspaper” and “privacy”. Mike means to listen, but Nancy bends into his line of sight, something secretive and soft about her half-smile.

“I know she’s not how you remember. That’s probably weird, huh?”

Mike tries to hold his face steady, tries not to betray the front he’s been putting forward, but it’s hard. Nancy’s words go right to the tension that’s been stirring in his head for the last few minutes – or maybe longer, maybe since the police station, when this woman who is and isn’t his mother first looked at him like he was the most precious thing in her world.

“It’s not a  _ bad _ weird,” he admits, hoping to end it there. The whole fucked-up tangle has only hurt because it’s reminded him of what he doesn’t have, what he  _ hasn’t  _ had. It hurts because he knows he has to leave it. He has to leave  _ them _ , even if he’s not entirely sure he  _ wants _ to. 

Nancy tightens her grip on his shoulder, giving it an affectionate squeeze. A twinkle in the edge of her smile, she says, “Just wait ‘til you hear how she broke into a secret Russian base over the summer.”

“ _ What?! _ ”

* * *

** Side A. **

“I think I know what the dog is.”

“What?” Lucas’ voice is muffled over the phone, static with movement.

The paper crumples in Will’s fist, the phone cord a tangle around his arm. He can feel the cold from the door out to the garage, rain seeping in around its crooked edges; mud is still splashed up the back of his jeans, a souvenir of the dash home from the bus stop, but he’s hardly given it a thought. The second he had burst through the front door, El at his side, he had scrambled for the binder tucked away in their closet, one old piece of art nagging him.

“Remember Shadowwind Marsh? When we fought the shambling mound?” In the next room, the murmur of  _ Guiding Light _ lowers nearly to mute; El is listening in.

“The time when Dustin threw up orange soda?”

“Yeah.” Will tugs on the phone cord, moving to sit down at the kitchen table. With his free hand, he spreads the drawing out in front of him. “And do you remember when we all got separated, and you and me got chased by the blink dogs?” Something in him still swells with self-consciousness, a tinge of childish embarrassment leftover from last summer. It’s been months since he thought of D&D, either by avoidance or by distraction, and longer yet since he’d really  _ talked _ about it with one of his friends.

Lucas is silent for a moment, then: “They sent me to the Ethereal Plane.”

“Right,” Will says. With his thumb, he traces over the figures on the page. His wizard, throwing out fireballs in vain. Lucas’ ranger, disappearing into a swirling portal. The blink dog, a hulking form in waxy black pencil, snarling across twisted, marshy underbrush. He can still hear Mike’s voice, painting suspense with every word as Lucas tossed aside his unfortunate roll, as Dustin howled in over-caffeinated schadenfreude.

“You think…” Lucas’ voice goes quieter, less assured. Nervous, almost. It’s almost chilling in its rarity. “You think Mike’s on the  _ Ethereal Plane _ ?” He doesn’t know where this is going, and Will’s brain wants to explain more efficiently than his mouth ever could. He’s never been the one with the plans or the theories; he’s usually the one the plans are  _ for _ , the one being rescued by his friends’ rapid-fire strategizing. This is new territory.

“His bike got hit with  _ something _ , and he just vanished,” Will explains. “So did the dog, right after Max and Nancy saw it. It just appeared, and then it just  _ dis _ appeared. We already know of another plane connected to ours by portals. Who’s to say these things aren’t  _ causing _ them?”

There’s a rustle into the speaker as Lucas breathes. “Maybe.”

Will’s heart sinks. The world shifts, the kitchen going off-kilter for a moment, as he tries to claw his way back into the moment. El is standing in the doorway by now, soaked ponytail clinging to her neck, concern clear on her face.

“ _ Maybe? _ ” Confusion and grief collide with a deeply buried anger, something simmering unseen since even before July. Will hates himself for the tears that start to blur his vision, turning the kitchen into a sepia kaleidoscope.

“We’ll look into it.” Lucas is calm, methodical. The  _ de facto _ captain, in Mike’s absence. “We’ll put it on the list.”

_ Screw the list _ , Will wants to say. What happened to the Lucas who went after monsters with only a slingshot and some stones? What happened to the Lucas who stole a shopping cart full of fireworks to save the world? Mike is the leader, and Dustin is the heart, but Lucas has always been the  _ action _ .

“We don’t have  _ time _ for that,” Will rebukes, fists clenching. He tries to imagine his friends back in 1983, sitting around and jotting items on a  _ list _ instead of walking out into a storm to look for him. How is this any different? What is there to sit and talk about? 

“Everyone wants to find him just as bad, man.” For the first time, Lucas almost sounds wounded. It makes Will want to drop the phone and hide. It makes him want to  _ scream _ .

“Then we have to look at  _ all _ the options, not just the easy ones!” Will can feel El’s eyes on him like lasers; she hasn’t heard him like this, but it can’t be a surprise. She’s known him with a monster under his skin, witnessed him killing and terrorizing and destroying. Is it that hard to believe that a little bit of him still burns?

“Nothing’s off the table ‘til we have more clues,” Lucas assures him. “We just have to be  _ logical _ .”

Logical. Like the Upside Down isn’t  _ logical _ . Like flipping through a D&D manual for a way to understand a monster isn’t how they’ve always handled crises in the past, year after year. Like Will’s just a  _ kid _ for defaulting to this, like he’s the one who still can’t grow up.

“So why hasn’t anyone  _ done _ anything?” He knows the tears are audible in his voice, and he knows he’ll feel humiliated later, but right now he can’t stop himself. It’s like the bat is back in his hands, and he’s hearing the branches of the beloved fort break under each blow. “Why am I the only one who thinks about the Upside Down when it’s not attacking us?”

“That’s not true!” In the background there’s a hum of conversation, fading into silence as Lucas carries the phone farther away. His voice softens, and he repeats himself: “That’s not true, man. We  _ all _ still think about it. Look, I check in on Erica every  _ night _ . Dustin’s mom tried to take him to a psychologist ‘cause he keeps screaming in his sleep.”

Will didn’t know that.  _ Why _ didn’t he know that?

“We all think about that shit every day,” Lucas finishes. And somehow, it only makes Will feel  _ worse _ .

“Then why’s it so crazy that Mike could be in there?” He wipes his sleeve across his eyes. El pads over in her socks and sits on the edge of another chair; the begs beneath her eyes are nearly as deep as Will’s, now. 

“It’s  _ not _ crazy.”

_ Friends don’t lie _ . “You’re acting like it is.”

“I’m  _ not _ ,” Lucas argues, but it’s weak. It’s distracted. There’s something he’s not saying, something he and the others back in Hawkins know, and it’s screaming behind each word. Will wants nothing more than to climb through the phone and back into their shared world, to find out whatever it is that makes them so goddamn sure Mike left everyone of his own volition. 

“Look,” Lucas says after a moment, “my dad’s gotta use the phone. I’ll talk to Dustin about the blinks, and then we’ll call you tomorrow night. Okay?”

“Okay.” Robotic, almost. Will barely registers the exchanged goodbyes, and the next thing he knows he’s fitting the phone back into its cradle, feeling El’s hand wrap around the crook of his elbow.

Then, finally, he lets the tears come.

* * *

** Side B. **

The jeep rumbles out of the parking lot, into late afternoon traffic, and Joyce clicks down on her lighter, watching it flicker to life.

“Brighton’ll be driving a desk ‘til he can learn to keep his damn mouth shut,” Hopper says, as if it’s not the third time he’s given her this information. His fists clench around the steering wheel as he turns onto the rough county road, towards home. The day has stretched on and on ever since the call from Karen:  _ Have you seen what’s on the front page of the paper? _

“You went out to the Whalens, right?” she asks around her cigarette. Hopper furrows his brow at the change of topic; his tirade against Barry Brighton’s big mouth has been going since he picked her up at the Hallmark store, and  _ sure _ , she’s just as concerned about the Wheelers’ privacy, but there’s something else she hasn’t been able to get out of her mind. Horses gnawed in half, and a startled teenage boy running barefoot into the show. The connection keeps trying to weave itself together in the back of her mind.

“This town couldn’t even give us six months before starting up again.”

“You think it’s-”  _ Monsters _ , Joyce wants to say, but it feels childish and ambiguous. It’s not a strong enough word for the terrifying howls she still hears in her sleep.

Hopper doesn’t take his eyes away from the road. Ten minutes to five, and dense clouds have the sky already darkening. “Nothing on Earth has a jaw that big,” he says. “A  _ shark _ couldn’t have done that. Whole front end of five horses taken right off. No blood spatter, single bite pattern. Whatever did it was bigger than them.”

Not one of those dogs, then. Joyce will never in her life forget the way they tore into flesh, piece by piece, blood painted everywhere. They’re dealing with something new.

“If it’s something from the Upside Down…” She starts, then stops. The first drop of cold rain flattens against the windshield. “Maybe that’s where he’s been. Maybe there’s a portal in the quarry, and these things got out when he did.” The police had dragged it back in 1983, but no one on the force knew to look for anything other than a drowned child and his waterlogged belongings. When he hadn’t been found on the first sweep, only a couple of possibilities had remained: either he’d wound up in some unreachable crevice, undetected by the available equipment, or something had happened to him after he fell. Whether that something was a wild animal or a Demogorgon differed, depending on what people knew.

Hopper just shakes his head. “Will barely survived a week in that place, there’s no way _ - _ ”

“I’m not saying I believe it,” Joyce argues. “I’m just- I’ve got nothing  _ else _ .” She takes a harsh drag of her cigarette, and scrubs a dry, cracked hand over her face.

“Look, we both saw his file from the hospital.” A handful of basic tests, just to make sure he was in working order. The only red mark was some mild anemia. “Wherever he was before Gladys found him, he was fed. He was taken care of. He didn’t just come from wandering around in a toxic wasteland for two years.”

And somehow, Joyce can’t help wondering if that’s  _ worse _ . Just like Karen said, it’s the known unknowns that keep you awake longest at night, not the monsters whose faces you’ve already seen. The Upside Down is something she’s familiar with, something she can understand. If they knew Mike had been lost in there, just like Will, then they could start the healing process.

But if someone had him, gave him food and clothes and shelter…  _ who _ ? Why? And why can’t he  _ tell _ them?

“You think they had him?” she asks. There’s no need to clarify.

“Can’t count anything out.” Gravel spits under the tires as the jeep turns off the highway. Rain is starting to come down in earnest now, and Hopper flicks on the wipers. For a moment he’s silent, twitching thumbs against worn leather, but just as the old, white farmhouse appears at the end of the road he continues: “I know he’s like one of your own, Joyce. I know there’s not a single one of us that wouldn’t go to bat for him. But in order to help him now, we need to know exactly what’s going on, whether or not it’s what we want to hear.”

Joyce nods, sniffing back the infuriating threat of tears.  _ Goddammit, Hop _ . As they pull into the driveway, all she can think to add is, “At least we know he’s not a dummy, this time.”

That gets a sideways smile out of Hopper. “Yeah, I don’t think Karen would let us cut him open.” He puts the car in park next to the Pinto, behind Karen’s station wagon and Jonathan’s dilapidated LTD. It’s as much of home as anything’s felt, the last few years. It’s the first time nothing’s been missing.

“She talked to Ted yet?” Hopper asks.

Joyce stubs out her cigarette. A light flicks on upstairs, and a burst of wind upsets the festive ribbons El had insisted on wrapping around the porch columns. “She keeps putting it off.”

“If it makes the Indianapolis Star, the whole state’ll know by Sunday.” He pushes his door open against the rainstorm’s first onslaught and pulls his coat tighter. “The second Ted Wheeler shows up at our front door, I’m putting them all in a motel.”

_ Our front door _ , Joyce thinks, unable to keep the smile from her face, even as winter wind goes right through her sweater.

“Your fault for not duct taping Barry Brighton’s mouth closed.”

* * *

The power flickers, just for a heartbeat, and Mike chews harder at his lip. He keeps expecting it, at any moment: the room will go dark, fall away, throw him back into the old woman’s house. Each time the storm dims the lights, he feels like he’s on the edge of a precipice, heart pounding with the effort of keeping himself  _ here _ .

“Are you okay?”

It sounds almost unfamiliar in Will’s voice, and that’s what pulls Mike back, yanks him out of his head. Thin, scratchy carpet. Backs against a plaid blanket. Rain and wind shaking the window of Will’s (new, wrong) bedroom. They’re cross-legged in front of a plastic binder and the air smells like the casserole baking downstairs.. 

“Yeah. Sorry.” An old exchange, passed between the two of them over and over since 1983, only this time it’s reversed. Mike can see the resigned disbelief in Will’s eyes, the way he quietly retreats back into observation, and it makes him want to hide. Instead, he looks back down at the binder. It’s the same one that sits on a table in his own basement, a world away; someone must have given it to Will after his death, here. While a lot of the drawings are familiar as old friends, flipped through hundreds of times back in middle school, there are many more that Mike doesn’t recognize. His eyes lock onto one now, a short-haired woman in long, emerald robes.

“That’s El’s druid,” Will explains, noticing Mike’s shift in attention.  _ Druid _ , not mage. Did she pick that class herself, without Mike to label her? How much else has she chosen on her own without his overbearing influence?

“Max?” he asks, gesturing to the opposite page, where telltale orange hair falls over the shoulders of a woman holding a truly obscene number of knives.

“Rogue.” Will smiles, and turns the page, revealing more drawings. The girls together, the girls with the whole party – minus one.

“They’re really good,” Mike says, voice clumsy and quiet. He pulls his knees up against his chest, hands fidgeting. There’s still a dizzy, anxious spin to his thoughts, even in this quiet moment.

Will’s cheeks flush a bit, and his smile tilts sideways. “No one’s campaigns are ever as good as yours.” And it’s complimentary, but it still strikes through Mike’s stomach like sadness, because the last time he and Will really talked about D&D, Will was angry. Will was angry, and Mike was defensive, and nothing was the same after that, as badly as he wanted to apologize. He still wants to apologize, only he  _ can’t _ , because the Will in front of him never witnessed that slow slide away from their old hobbies. He never had to watch Mike cast off something that used to draw them together, in favor of a pursuit that made him feel more grown up, more distanced from the boy he’d been when his life started disintegrating.

It’s hard to find excitement fighting monsters on a board after they’ve nearly killed you time and again in real life.

“I miss it,” he finally says, thinking more of the companionship than the roll of a die. Laughter, Cheeto crumbs, tipped plastic cups of soda. A feeling of invincibility that he hasn’t known since.

“You could play with us, once school’s out.” Will rearranges his legs, and his knee brushes Mike’s ankle. “If my mom and Hop let them all come over.”

“Yeah?” Mike looks over, then turns his head back front. It’s been months since he’s sat so close to someone, and there’s a vulnerability to it that pricks right under his skin. “That would be cool.”

Cool, and full of logistical concerns. How does amnesia work? Is he supposed to remember how to play D&D? A wild, groundless thought floats through his mind, of sneaking out to the library and reading up on his supposed condition.

He flips another page, but barely sees the drawing. Pencil lines, colored patches, and a thought that keeps nagging him, the longer he senses Will’s unease. They came up here to escape their parents’ panicked conversations, the new threat of journalists and phone calls and flashbulbs, but Mike can’t help feeling like he’s no more trusted than Barry Brighton. And why would he be? He’s given them no reason. Hopper already  _ knows _ he’s lying, and it’s just a matter of time until he’s cast out as an imposter.

He swallows, twisting his hands. “Sorry I scared everyone yesterday, at breakfast.”

Will looks up from the binder, clearly not expecting this. “Did something happen?” It’s careful, like he’s trying not to frighten a fawn. Mike hates it.

“I think-” The light flickers again, and the windows flash white. “I didn’t know what was real, for a second.” The most honest thing he’s said in days, and it feels like vertigo coming out, like he’s a breath from blacking out with panic and adrenaline. And on a level that he can’t explain out loud - one that this Will would never understand - it’s as close to a confession about the last few months as he’s come. They didn’t go crazy together after all. Instead, Will moved on with his life and Mike could hardly manage to get out of bed in the morning. One of them was possessed by a monster, and the other was really just broken in the end.

“Do you know now?” Will asks, and his voice is full of so much tenderness that Mike wants to cry. Instead, he just nods, hands wrung so tight that his knuckles have gone pale.

“I’m sorry for everything else, too.” It spills out faster, and he pinches his eyes closed. “For leaving. I didn’t want to.” Fingernails dig into his skin, and it takes him a second to realize they’re his own. He feels like he’ll fly apart if he lets himself breathe, just dissolve into atoms, like El did in a middle school classroom so long ago. 

Will is quiet for a moment, then says, “I thought you didn’t remember.” It’s hardly above a whisper, pointed at the carpet.

“I remember the cliff.” He presses his lips together, trying to keep them from quivering. In a way, his sneakers have always stayed inches from the cliff’s edge, in nightmares or in moments of panic. A knee-jerk impulse to  _ leave _ , to self-destruct. Is that what he was feeling the morning he left home? Was the cliff behind the incomprehensible whirlwind of ideas that shoved him out the door, into the dark, coatless and thoughtless and so very  _ sure _ ?

“Jonathan told me you were sad.” Will rests his head on his knee, and Mike wishes he could reach out and  _ touch _ him, break through his own deadlock. “He said that’s why you did it.”

“I’m sorry,” Mike says again, and it sounds so  _ stupid _ . He wants to press at his eyes, to tear at his hair, but he can’t stop twisting his goddamn hands, like breaking his knuckles will somehow fix everything he’s screwed up. “Something’s wrong with my head, sometimes.”

There’s only silence for a few moments, but then, without a breath or a sound, Will reaches out and lays his hands across Mike’s.

“Mine too,” he says quietly. “Can I help?”

It’s “ _ Crazy together” _ . It’s a heavy blanket across jittering shoulders. It’s the first words on playground wood chips, and it’s the last smile across the Byers’ kitchen, the one that made Mike’s heart hiccup in that way he’s always associated with his closest friend. Safe, comforting, almost  _ secret _ . A bond no one else can touch.

“You already are,” he answers, watching as Will gently unravels his fingers. Lightning flashes across the room again, and the bedside lamp dims for a moment, but Mike’s thoughts don’t tumble. He doesn’t have to scrabble for a hold on reality or brace himself to be lost to that other place. He just sits and watches Will, until the anxiety in his chest blurs to an easy pulse, and the storm outside begins to fade into the background.

* * *

** Side A. **

The front door clicks shut, cutting off the whistle of wet wind outside. Nancy shuffles her tennis shoes against the mat, then toes them off; somewhere, the fuzzy audio of a  _ Care Bears _ tape signals Holly’s pre-bed routine, and she starts to follow it.

She makes it to the living room doorway, a rectangle of yellow that spreads into the dark foyer, before her mother’s voice stops her.

“The school called.”

_ Shit _ . Pursing her lips, Nancy turns. The living room is a tableau of tragedy, her mother slumped on the stiff, pristine couch. There’s a glass of merlot in one hand, nearly empty; her whole body is a tense line around its stem, held tight like a horse’s bit.

“I was out looking.” She and Jonathan had driven Roane and Carroll and Howard Counties raw, until the sun was going down and the station wagon had run out of gas. No clues, no ideas, no leads. She had left him in Greenwood, and white-knuckled the stormy drive back home. 

Her mother looks up, eyes rimmed by smudged makeup. “You  _ can’t _ just-”

“What am I  _ supposed _ to be doing?”

“-ignore everything and-”

“You mean like  _ you _ are?” Nancy bites it out, and it hits like a fuse being lit between them. Her throat flutters with a hundred tumbling, poisonous words. She sees the moment it strikes her mother, a single lightning bolt through ceramic. A hairline fracture, behind frizzing Clairol blonde.

“I’ve been trying to find him since  _ Wednesday morning,”  _ she continues, but there’s something hoarse and strained in her voice now, something that hurts to press through. “And you and dad have just been-”

Her mother sets down the wine glass, but she doesn’t look up. “Your father has a job to keep, and I have your sister to look after.” It’s weak, but terse, a quivering shake of the fist. “We don’t have the privilege to stop our whole  _ lives _ and-”

“That’s  _ bullshit _ .” Nancy steps into the doorway. The air on the other side feels like the storm brewing overhead. “That’s-”

“Nancy-” Surprise tinged with heartbreak. Wide eyes that haven’t slept since Tuesday night.

“If Mrs. Byers had just sat around and listened to the police, they  _ never _ would have found Will! He would have been  _ dead _ !” It’s cruel, contextless, but Nancy can’t bring herself to care. Anger swells in her chest, a kitchen fire under a hot lid, and seeing her mother again is all the oxygen it needs.

“That was  _ different _ , he didn’t...”

_ Run away. Take things _ . All of the bullshit that her parents keep saying, that the police keep propagating. Not for the first time, she wishes she could just spill it all, come out with the whole awful truth. Maybe then they’d understand just how much danger and hurt has been following their around for years. Maybe they’d see the real danger her brother is in, not just from the world but from himself, from everything he and his friends have been through. It’s not just his girlfriend and best friend leaving, sending him into a spiral of bad behavior. It’s  _ more _ , and it’s  _ always _ been more, ever since they picked him up from Hawkins Middle School long after midnight.

“What about the bike, mom?” She feels herself choke it out, like it’s been pulled right from her chest, and it takes her a moment to realize that tears have welled up in her eyes, hot and unbidden. “What about the  _ bike _ ? How can you keep saying he’s  _ fine _ ?”

Her mother’s hands are wringing, beneath a gaze that deteriorates from discomfort, to sadness, right to heartbreak. “Nancy…”

“Do you really think he’s safe?” Nancy wraps her arms around herself, knees locked over the threshold. Her chest feels like ice. “Do you  _ really _ believe that?” And for a moment it looks like her mother’s going to answer, like she’s going to break, and maybe that’s what Nancy’s been praying for all this time. Maybe this is when the dam bursts, and when everything falls apart, she’ll finally find what they’ve been missing. The thing she thought she’d recovered over the summer, that looks like her mother’s bright eyes and warm encouragement. Her own arms wind tighter, like the embrace she so desperately wants, and for just a second she lets herself hope.

But the second ends, and she watches her mother fall back into herself. Manicured fingers wind around the glass’s stem. “I don’t know what else to do.”

It isn’t nothing. It isn’t enough, but it isn’t nothing.

“Get out there and search with us,” Nancy presses. “We’re going back out tomorrow.” She takes a step closer, but she feels like she hasn’t moved at all. What is her mother so afraid of? Is it what she might find out there in the underbrush? Is it her sham of a life splintering right down the middle? Would she rather have no answers than bad answers?

“Holly has gymnastics.”

It’s not surprising enough to be a disappointment. Nancy just clenches her backpack strap under one hand and backs out of the doorway, swallowing down a sharp comeback. But then, as if summoned by the weak excuse, a small voice sounds from the far end of the foyer.

“Mommy?” Holly, in her pink nightgown, eyes flicking between Nancy and the living room doorway. Their mother’s head snaps up, then turns to the brass clock nestled on the bookshelves, next to dustless encyclopedia volumes that have never been opened, and knick-knacks bought firsthand from department stores.

“Oh, honey.” She stands up, a woozy slant to her movements, and heads towards Holly, slipping right past her oldest child without a glance. “Your SpaghettiOs. Let me heat them back up.” Glancing back at the clock, Nancy wrinkles her brow. Dinner is never served past six in Karen Wheeler’s household, like clockwork under rigorous scrutiny.

It’s a quarter to nine.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Gift](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23404882) by Anonymous 


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